CONTENTS

The Glass Bead Game: A General Introduction to Its History for the Layman

The Life of Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht

1 The Call
2 Waldzell
3 Years of Freedom
4 Two Orders
5 The Mission
6 Magister Ludi
7 In Office
8 The Two Poles
9 A Conversation
10 Preparations
11 The Circular Letter
12 The Legend

Joseph Knecht's Posthumous Writings

The Poems of Knecht's Student Years

The Three Lives

1 The Rainmaker
2 The Father Confessor
3 The Indian Life




THE GLASS BEAD GAME: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION
TO ITS HISTORY FOR THE LAYMAN


. . .Non entia enim licet quodammodo levibusque hominibus facilius atque
incuriosiusverbis reddere quam entia, veruntamen pio diligentique rerum
scriptori plane aliter res se habet:nihil tantum repugnat ne verbis illu-
stretur, at nihil adeo necesse est ante hominum oculosproponere ut certas
quasdam res, quas esse neque demonstrari neque probari potest, quae contra
eo ipso, quod pii diligentesque viri illas quasi ut entia tractant, enti
nascendique facultati paululum appropinquant.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　ALBERTUS SECUNDUS
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　tract. de cristall. spirit.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　ed. Clangor et Collof. lib. I, cap. 28.

In Joseph Knecht's holograph translation:

. . .For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-
existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words
than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is
just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than
to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor
probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as
existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possi-
bility of being born.

It is our intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical
material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht, or Ludi
Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead
Game. We are not unaware that this endeavor runs, or seems to run, some-
what counter to the prevailing laws and usages of our intellectual life.
For, after all, obliteration of individuality, the maximum integration
of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has
ever been one of our ruling principles. And in the course of our long
tradition this principle has been observed with such thoroughness that
today it is exceedingly difficult, and in many cases completely impos-
sible, to obtain biographical and psychological information on various
persons who have served the hierarchy in exemplary fashion. In very
many cases it is no longer even possible to determine their original
names. The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity,
and comes very close to the realization of that ideal. This fact re-
mains one of the abiding characteristics of intellectual life in our
Province.

If we have nevertheless persisted in our endeavor to determine some of
the facts about the life of Ludi Magister Josephus III, and at least to
sketch the outlines of his character, we believe we have done so not
out of any cult of personality, nor out of disobedience to the customs,
but on the contrary solely in the service of truth and scholarship.
It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a
thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis. We up-
hold and venerate the idea that underlies the anonymity of our author-
ities and our intellectual life. But a glance at the early history of
that life of the mind we now lead, namely, a glance at the development
of the Glass Bead Game, shows us irrefutably that every phase of its
development, every extension, every change, every essential segment of
its history, whether it be seen as progressive or conservative, bears
the plain imprint of the person who introduced the change. He was not
necessarily its sole or actual author, but he was the instrument of
transformation and perfection.

Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something
quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier
times meant by it. For them, and especially for the writers of those
days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personal-
ity seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all
too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even
speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond
all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possi-
ble integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to
the suprapersonal. If we look closely into the matter we shall see that
the ancients had already perceived this ideal. The figure of the Sage or
Perfect One among the ancient Chinese, for example, or the ideal of Soc-
ratic ethics, can scarcely be distinguished from our present ideal; and
many a great organization, such as the Roman Church in the eras of its
greatest power, has recognized similar principles. Indeed, many of its
greatest figures, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, appear to us--like early
Greek sculptures--more the classical representatives of types than in-
dividuals.

Nevertheless, in the period before the reformation of the intellectual
life, a reformation which began in the twentieth century and of which we
are the heirs, that authentic ancient ideal had patently come near to being
entirely lost. We are astonished when the biographies of those times rather
garrulously relate how many brothers and sisters the hero had, or what psy-
chological scars and blotches were left behind from his casting off the
skins of childhood and puberty, from the struggle for position and the search
for love. We moderns are not interested in a hero's pathology or family his-
tory, nor in his drives, his digestion, and how he sleeps. Not even his in-
tellectual background--the influence upon his development of his favorite
studies, favorite reading, and so on--is particularly important to us. For
us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his
education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly
absorbed in its hierarchic function without at the same time forfeiting the
vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which make for the savor and worth of the
individual. And if conflicts arise between the individual and the hierarchy,
we regard these very conflicts as a touchstone for the stature of a personal-
ity. We do not approve of the rebel who is driven by his desires and passions
to infringements upon law and order; we find all the more worthy of our rev-
erence the memory of those who tragically sacrificed themselves for the great-
er whole.

These latter are the heroes, and in the case of these truly exemplary men,
interest in the individual, in the name, face, and gesture, seems to us per-
missible and natural. For we do not regard even the perfect hierarchy, the
most harmonious organization, as a machine put together out of lifeless un-
its that count for nothing in themselves, but as a living body, formed of
parts and animated by organs which possess their own nature and freedom.
Every one of them shares in the miracle of life. In this sense, then, we
have endeavored to obtain information on the life of Joseph Knecht, Master
of the Glass Bead Game, and especially to collect everything written by
himself. We have, moreover, obtained several manuscripts we consider worth
reading.

What we have to say about Knecht's personality and life is surely familiar
in whole or in part to a good many members of the Order, especially the Glass
Bead Game players, and for this reason among others our book is not addressed
to this circle alone, but is intended to appeal more widely to sympathetic
readers.

For the narrower circle, our book would need neither introduction nor com-
mentary. But since we also wish our hero's life and writings to be studied
outside the Order, we are confronted with the somewhat difficult task of
prefacing our book with a brief popular introduction, for that less-prepared
reader, into the meaning and history of the Glass Bead Game. We stress that
this introduction is intended only for popular consumption and makes no
claim whatsoever to clarifying the questions being discussed within the Or-
der itself on the problems and history of the Game. The time for an object-
ive account of that subject is still far in the future.

Let no one, therefore, expect from us a complete history and theory of the
Glass Bead Game. Even authors of higher rank and competence than ourself
would not be capable of providing that at the present time. That task must
remain reserved to later ages, if the sources and the intellectual prere-
quisites for the task have not previously been lost. Still less is our essay
intended as a textbook of the Glass Bead Game; indeed, no such thing will
ever be written. The only way to learn the rules of this Game of games is to
take the usual prescribed course, which requires many years; and none of the
initiates could ever possibly have any interest in making these rules easier
to learn.

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind
of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts,
but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of ex-
pressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclu-
sions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a
mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays
with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played
with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works
of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that sub-
sequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted
into intellectual property--on all this immense body of intellectual values
the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this or-
gan has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals
range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.
Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire
intellectual content of the universe. These manuals, pedals, and stops are
now fixed. Changes in their number and order, and attempts at perfecting them,
are actually no longer feasible except in theory. Any enrichment of the lan-
guage of the Game by addition of new contents is subject to the strictest con-
ceivable control by the directorate of the Game. On the other hand, within
this fixed structure, or to abide by our image, within the complicated mecha-
nism of this giant organ, a whole universe of possibilities and combinations
is available to the individual player. For even two out of a thousand strin-
gently played games to resemble each other more than superficially is hardly
possible. Even if it should so happen that two players by chance were to
choose precisely the same small assortment of themes for the content of their
Game, these two Games could present an entirely different appearance and run
an entirely different course, depending on the qualities of mind, character,
mood, and virtuosity of the players.

How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the
Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like ev-
ery great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least
the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a
good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and
then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civi-
lization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the sev-
eral pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads
on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies
and the runes of Novalis's hallucinatory visions. This same eternal idea,
which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every
movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Pla-
tonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement be-
tween the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward recon-
ciliation between science and art or science and religion. Men like Abelard,
Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar with the dream of capturing
the universe of the intellect in concentric systems, and pairing the living
beauty of thought and art with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences.
In that age in which music and mathematics almost simultaneously attained
classical heights, approaches and cross-fertilizations between the two disci-
plines occurred frequently. And two centuries earlier we find in Nicholas
of Cues sentences of the same tenor, such as this: "The mind adapts itself
to potentiality in order to measure everything in the mode of potentiality,
and to absolute necessity in order to measure everything in the mode of unit-
y and simplicity as God does, and to the necessity of nexus in order to mea-
sure everything with respect to its peculiar nature; finally, it adapts it-
self to determinate potentiality in order to measure everything with respect
to its existence. But furthermore the mind also measures symbolically, by
comparison, as when it employs numerals and geometric figures and equates
other things with them."

Incidentally, this is not the only one of Nicholas's ideas that almost seems
to suggest our Glass Bead Game, or corresponds to and springs from a similar
branch of the imagination as theplay of thought which occurs in the Game. Many
similar echoes can be found in his writings. Hispleasure in mathematics also,
and his delight and skill in using constructions and axioms of Euclidean geo-
metry as similes to clarify theological and philosophical concepts, likewise
appearto be very close to the mentality of the Game. At times even his pecu-
liar Latin (abounding inwords of his own coinage, whose meaning, however, was
perfectly plain to any Latin scholar)calls to mind the improvisatory agility
of the Game's language.

As the epigraph of our treatise may already have suggested, Albertus Secundus
deservesan equal place among the ancestors of the Glass Bead Game. And we
suspect, although we cannot prove this by citations, that the idea of the Game
also dominated the minds of those learned musicians of the sixteenth, seven-
teenth, and eighteenth centuries who based their musical compositions on math-
ematical speculations. Here and there in the ancient literatures we encounter
legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars,
monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of
chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to
their usual functions. And of course everyone has heard those fables and legends
from the formative years of all civilizations which ascribe to music powers far
greater than those of any mere art: the capacity to control men and nations.
These accounts make of music a kind of secret regent, or a lawbook for men
and their governments. From the most ancient days of China to the myths of the
Greeks we find the concept of an ideal, heavenly life for men under the hegemony
of music. The Glass Bead Gameis intimately bound up with this cult of music
("in eternal transmutations the secret power of song greets us here below,"
says Novalis).

Although we thus recognize the idea of the Game as eternally present, and there-
foreexistent in vague stirrings long before it became a reality, its realiza-
tion in the form we know itnevertheless has its specific history. We shall now
attempt to give a brief account of the mostimportant stages in that history.


The beginnings of the intellectual movement whose fruits are, among many o-
thers, the establishment of the Order and the Glass Bead Game itself, may be
traced back to a period which Plinius Ziegenhalss, the historian of literature,
designated as the Age of the Feuilleton, by which name it has been known ever
since. Such tags are pretty, but dangerous; they constantly tempt us to a bi-
ased view of the era in question. And as a matter of fact the Age of the Feu-
illeton was by no means uncultured; it was not even intellectually impover-
ished. But if we may believe Ziegenhalss, that age appears to have had only
the dimmest notion of what to do with culture. Or rather, it did not know how
to assign culture its proper place within the economy of life and the nation.
To be frank, we really are very poorly informed about that era, even though
it is the soil out of which almost everything that distinguishes our cultural
life today has grown.

It was, according to Ziegenhalss, an era emphatically "bourgeois" and given to
an almost untrammeled individualism. If in order to suggest the atmosphere we
cite some of its features from Ziegenhalss' description, we may at least do so
with the confidence that these features have not been invented, badly drawn,
or grossly exaggerated. For the great scholar has documented them from a vast
number of literary and other sources. We take our cue from this scholar, who so
far has been the sole serious investigator of the Feuilletonistic Age. As we
read, we should remember that it is easy and foolish to sneer at the mistakes
or barbarities of remote ages.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, intellectual life in Europe seems to have
evolved along two major lines. The first of these was the liberation of thought
and belief from the sway of all authority. In practice this meant the struggle
of Reason, which at last felt it had come of age and won its independence,
against the domination of the Roman Church. The second trend, on the other
hand, was the covert but passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy
on this freedom, for a new and sufficient authority arising out of Reason itself.
We can probably generalize and say that Mind has by and large won this often
strangely contradictory battle for two aims basically at odds with each other.

Has the gain been worth the countless victims? Has our present structure of
the life of the mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long
enough, to justify as worthwhile sacrifices all the sufferings, convulsions,
and abnormalities: the trials of heretics, the burnings at stake, the many "gen-
iuses" who ended in madness or suicide? For us, it is not permissible to ask
these questions. History is as it has happened. Whether it was good, whether it
would have been better not to have happened, whether we will or will not acknow-
ledge that it has had "meaning" - all this is irrelevant. Thus those struggles
for the "freedom" of the human intellect likewise "happened," and subsequently,
in the course of the aforementioned Age of the Feuilleton, men came to enjoy an
incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand. For while
they had overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State
partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could
respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy. Ziegenhalss recounts some
truly astonishing examples of the intellect's debasement, venality, and self-
betrayal during that period.

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those pro-
ducts from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have form-
ed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the
millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of
culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items
of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of
them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many
such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persi-
flage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do
indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood
until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases
attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were freelance
scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer," but a
great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were
celebrated university professors.

Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives
or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich
Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870," or "The Composer Rossini's Favorite
Dishes," or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans," and so
on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what
was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream of
Creating Gold Through the Centuries," or "Physico-chemical Experiments in In-
fluencing the Weather," and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the
titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been
people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes
us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have help-
ed to "service" this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly,
"service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relation-
ship of man to the machine at that time.

In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems
were particularly popular. Ziegenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these.
Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example,
or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn
out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive
causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was
to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The
reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives
hundreds.

As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this
busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of des-
peration--it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of
those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority,
who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all
these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting
changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old pal-
ace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scan-
dal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the
facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they
received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic,
and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbl-
ing poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and
phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irres-
ponsibly turned out.

Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular con-
comitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role
in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A
long disquisition by Ziegenhalss on the curious subject of "Crossword Puzzles"
describes the phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of persons, the majority
of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their leisure hours sitting
over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps
according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or
insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these peo-
ple with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were
by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anx-
iously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a
number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were
not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep
need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebod-
ings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously
learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves
in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost
without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and
could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many art-
icles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to
strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within them-
selves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

For there was also a good deal of lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this
somewhat more dignified variant of the feature article. Both specialists and
intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were
still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been
robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were
not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a
frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quanti-
ties. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at
least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures of-
fering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, po-
ets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience at these
lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between aud-
ience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were
tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were en-
tertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would
be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frockcoat to seduce
some Strassburg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number
of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was de-
lighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on
writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompa-
nied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature
articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cul-
tural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning. To put it brief-
ly, they were already on the verge of that dreadful devaluation of the Word
which produced, at first in secret and within the narrowest circles, that as-
cetically heroic counter-movement which soon afterward began to flow visibly
and powerfully, and ushered in the new self-discipline and dignity of the
human intellect.

It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era show-
ed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and false-
ness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of
apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void:
great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an ac-
celerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and
even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with pre-
monitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, in-
cluding the beginnings of a science of music of which we are the grateful heirs.

But although it is easy to fit any given segment of the past neatly and intel-
ligibly into the patterns of world history, contemporaries are never able to
see their own place in the patterns. Consequently, even as intellectual ambi-
tions and achievements declined rapidly during that period, intellectuals in
particular were stricken by terrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had
just fully realized (a discovery that had been in the air, here and there,
from the time of Nietzsche on) that the youth and the creative period of our
culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in. Suddenly everyone felt
this and many bluntly expressed this view; it was used to explain many of the
alarming signs of the time: the dreary mechanization of life, the profound
debasement of morality, the decline of faith among nations, the inauthenti-
city of art. The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chi-
nese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slow-
ly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the
schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among
those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as un-
trammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts. Various attitudes
could be taken toward this enemy who had breached the walls and could no long-
er be exorcised. Some of the best tacitly acknowledged and stoically endured
the bitter truth. Some attempted to deny its existence, and thanks to the shod-
dy thinking of some of the literary prophets of cultural doom, found a good many
weak points in their thesis. Moreover, those who took exception to the afore-
mentioned prophets could be sure of a hearing and influence among the bour-
geoisie. For the allegation that the culture he had only yesterday been proud
to possess was no longer alive, that the education and art he revered could no
longer be regarded as genuine education and genuine art, seemed to the bour-
geois as brazen and intolerable as the sudden inflations of currency and the
revolutions which threatened his accumulated capital.

Another possible immunization against the general mood of doom was cynicism.
People went dancing and dismissed all anxiety about the future as old-fashion-
ed folly; people composed heady articles about the approaching end of art,
science, and language. In that feuilleton world they had constructed of paper,
people postulated the total capitulation of Mind, the bankruptcy of ideas,
and pretended to be looking on with cynical calm or bacchantic rapture as
not only art, culture, morality, and honesty, but also Europe and "the world"
proceeded to their doom. Among the good there prevailed a quietly resigned
gloom, among the wicked a malicious pessimism. The fact was that a breakdown
of outmoded forms, and a degree of reshuffling both of the world and its mor-
ality by means of politics and war, had to take place before the culture it-
self became capable of real self-analysis and a new organization.

Yet during the decades of transition this culture had not slumbered. Rather,
during the very period of its decay and seeming capitulation by the artists,
professors, and feature writers, it entered into a phase of intense alertness
and self-examination. The medium of this change lay in the consciences of a
few individuals. Even during the heyday of the feuilleton there were every-
where individuals and small groups who had resolved to remain faithful to
true culture and to devote all their energies to preserving for the future
a core of good tradition, discipline, method, and intellectual rigor. We are
today ignorant of many details, but in general the process of self-examina-
tion, reflection, and conscious resistance to decline seems to have centered
mostly in two groups. The cultural conscience of scholars found refuge in the
investigations and didactic methods of the history of music, for this disci-
pline was just reaching its height at that time, and even in the midst of the
feuilleton world two famous seminaries fostered an exemplary methodology,
characterized by care and thoroughness. Moreover, as if destiny wished to
smile comfortingly upon this tiny, brave cohort, at this saddest of times
there took place that glorious miracle which was in itself pure chance, but
which gave the effect of a divine corroboration: the rediscovery of eleven
manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been in the keeping of his
son Friedemann.

A second focus of resistance to degeneration was the League of Journeyers to
the East. The brethren of that League cultivated a spiritual rather than an
intellectual discipline. They fostered piety and reverence, and to them we
owe important elements in our present form of cultural life and of the Glass
Bead Game, in particular the contemplative elements. The Journeyers also con-
tributed to new insights into the nature of our culture and the possibilities
of its continuance, not so much by analytical and scholarly work as by their
capacity, based on ancient secret exercises, for mystic identification with
remote ages and cultural conditions. Among them, for example, were itinerant
instrumentalists and minstrels who were said to have the ability to perform
the music of earlier epochs with perfect ancient purity. Thus they could play
and sing a piece of music from 1600 or 1650 exactly as if all the subsequent
modes, refinements, and virtuoso achievements were still unknown. This was an
astonishing feat in a period in which the mania for dynamics and gradazione
dominated all music-making, when the music itself was almost forgotten in dis-
cussions of the conductor's execution and "conception." When an orchestra of
the Journeyers first publicly performed a suite from the time before Handel
completely without crescendi and diminuendi, with the naïveté and chasteness
of another age and world, some among the audience are said to have been total-
ly uncomprehending, but others listened with fresh attention and had the im-
pression that they were hearing music for the first time in their lives. In
the League's concert hall between Bremgarten and Morbio, one member built a
Bach organ as perfectly as Johann Sebastian Bach would have had it built had
he had the means and opportunity. Obeying a principle even then current in the
League, the organ builder concealed his name, calling himself Silbermann after
his eighteenth-century predecessor.

In discussing these matters we have approached the sources from which our mod-
ern concept of culture sprang. One of the chief of these was the most recent of
the scholarly disciplines, the history of music and the aesthetics of music.
Another was the great advance in mathematics that soon followed. To these was
added a sprinkling of the wisdom of the Journeyers to the East and, closely re-
lated to the new conception and interpretation of music, that courageous new at-
titude, compounded of serenity and resignation, toward the aging of cultures.
It would be pointless to say much about these matters here, since they are fami-
liar to everyone. The most important consequence of this new attitude, or rather
this new subordination to the cultural process, was that men largely ceased to
produce works of art. Moreover, intellectuals gradually withdrew from the bustle
of the world. Finally, and no less important--indeed, the climax of the whole
development--there arose the Glass Bead Game.

The growing profundity of musical science, which can already be observed soon
after 1900 when feuilletonism was still at its height, naturally exerted enor-
mous influence upon the beginnings of the Game. We, the heirs of musicology, be-
lieve we know more about the music of the great creative centuries, especially
the seventeenth and eighteenth, and in a certain sense even understand it bet-
ter than all previous epochs, including that of classical music itself. As de-
scendants, of course, our relation to classical music differs totally from that
of our predecessors in the creative ages. Our intellectualized veneration for
true music, all too frequently tainted by melancholic resignation, is a far cry
from the charming, simple-hearted delight in music-making of those days. We
tend to envy those happier times whenever our pleasure in their music makes us
forget the conditions and tribulations amid which it was begotten. Almost the
entire twentieth century considered philosophy, or else literature, to be the
great lasting achievement of that cultural era which lies between the end of
the Middle Ages and modern times. We, however, have for generations given the
palm to mathematics and music. Ever since we have renounced--on the whole,
at any rate--trying to vie creatively with those generations, ever since we
have also forsworn the worship of harmony in music-making, and of that purely
sensuous cult of dynamics--a cult that dominated musical practices for a
good two centuries after the time of Beethoven and early Romanticism -- ever
since then we have been able to understand, more purely and more correctly,
the general image of that culture whose heirs we are. Or so we believe in our
uncreative, retrospective, but reverent fashion! We no longer have any of the
exuberant fecundity of those days. For us it is almost incomprehensible that
musical style in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could be preserved for
so long a time in unalloyed purity. How could it be, we ask, that among the
vast quantities of music written at that time we fail to find a trace of any-
thing bad? How could the eighteenth century, the time of incipient degeneration,
still send hurtling into the skies a fireworks display of styles, fashions,
and schools, blazing briefly but with such self-assurance? Nevertheless, we be-
lieve that we have uncovered the secret of what we now call classical music,
that we have understood the spirit, the virtue, and the piety of those genera-
tions, and have taken all that as our model. Nowadays, for example, we do not
think much of the theology and the ecclesiastical culture of the eighteenth
century, or the philosophy of the Enlightenment; but we consider the cantatas,
passions, and preludes of Bach the ultimate quintessence of Christian culture.

Incidentally, there exists an ancient and honorable exemplar for the attitude
of our own culture toward music, a model to which the players of the Glass Bead
Game look back with great veneration. We recall that in the legendary China of
the Old Kings, music was accorded a dominant place in state and court. It was
held that if music throve, all was well with culture and morality and with the
kingdom itself. The music masters were required to be the strictest guardians
of the original purity of the "venerable keys." If music decayed, that was ta-
ken as a sure sign of the downfall of the regime and the state. The poets told
horrific fables about the forbidden, diabolic, heaven-offending keys, such as
the Tsing Shang key, and Tsing Tse, the "music of decline"; no sooner were
these wicked notes struck in the Royal Palace than the sky darkened, the walls
trembled and collapsed, and kingdom and sovereign went to their doom. We might
quote many other sayings by the ancient writers, but we shall cite here only a
few passages from the chapter on music in Lü Bu We's Spring and Autumn:

"The origins of music lie far back in the past. Music arises from Measure and
is rooted in the great Oneness. The great Oneness begets the two poles; the
two poles beget the power of Darkness and of Light.

"When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey
their superiors in all their courses, then music can be perfected. When de-
sires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected.
Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises
from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos.
Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the
meaning of the cosmos.

"Music is founded on the harmony between heaven and earth, on the concord of
obscurity and brightness.

"Decaying states and men ripe for doom do not, of course, lack music either,
but their music is not serene. Therefore, the more tempestuous the music, the
more doleful are the people, the more imperiled the country, the more the
sovereign declines. In this way the essence of music is lost.

"What all sacred sovereigns have loved in music was its serenity. The tyrants
Giae and Jou Sin made tempestuous music. They thought loud sounds beautiful
and massed effects interesting. They strove for new and rare tonal effects,
for notes which no ear had ever heard hitherto. They sought to surpass each
other, and overstepped all bounds.

"The cause of the degeneration of the Chu state was its invention of magic
music. Such music is indeed tempestuous enough, but in truth it has departed
from the essence of music. Because it has departed from the essence of real
music, this music is not serene. If music is not serene, the people grumble
and life is deranged. All this arises from mistaking the nature of music and
seeking only tempestuous tonal effects.

"Therefore the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is
its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its
government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and
sad, and its government is imperiled."

The words of this Chinese writer point fairly distinctly to the origins and
to the real although almost forgotten meaning of all music. For in prehistoric
times music, like the dance and every other artistic endeavor, was a branch
of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working. Beg-
inning with rhythm (clapping of hands, tramping, beating of sticks and prim-
itive drums), it was a powerful, tried-and-true device for putting large num-
bers of people "in tune" with one another, engendering the same mood, co-or-
dinating the pace of their breathing and heartbeats, encouraging them to in-
voke and conjure up the eternal powers, to dance, to compete, to make war, to
worship. And music has retained this original, pure, primordially powerful
character, its magic, far longer than the other arts. We need only recall the
many testimonies of historians and poets to the power of music, from the
Greeks to Goethe in his Novelle. In practice, marches and the dance have ne-
ver lost their importance. . . But let us return to our subject.

We shall now give a brief summary of the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game.
It appears to have arisen simultaneously in Germany and in England. In both
countries, moreover, it was originally a kind of exercise employed by those
small groups of musicologists and musicians who worked and studied in the
new seminaries of musical theory. If we compare the original state of the
Game with its subsequent developments and its present form, it is much like
comparing a musical score of the period before 1500, with its primitive notes
and absence of bar lines, with an eighteenth-century score, let alone with
one from the nineteenth with its confusing excess of symbols for dynamics,
tempi, phrasing, and so on, which often made the printing of such scores a
complex technical problem.

The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory
and ingenuity among students and musicians. And as we have said, it was play-
ed both in England and Germany before it was "invented" here in the Musical
Academy of Cologne, and was given the name it bears to this day, after so
many generations, although it has long ceased to have anything to do with
glass beads.

The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, a rather eccentric but clever, soci-
able, and humane musicologist, used glass beads instead of letters, numerals,
notes, or other graphic symbols. Perrot, who incidentally has also bequeath-
ed to us a treatise on the Apogee and Decline of Counterpoint, found that
the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to
play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science,
motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had
to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a high-
er or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in
memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue
among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and
Bach--although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas,
but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.

Bastian Perrot in all probability was a member of the Journeyers to the East.
He was partial to handicrafts and had himself built several pianos and clav-
ichords in the ancient style. Legend has it that he was adept at playing the
violin in the old way, forgotten since 1800, with a high-arched bow and hand-
regulated tension of the bow hairs. Given these interests, it was perhaps on-
ly natural that he should have constructed a frame, modeled on a child's ab-
acus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads
of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of
the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so on. In
this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes,
could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in count-
erpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the
pupils liked it; it was imitated and became fashionable in England too. For
a time the game of musical exercises was played in this charmingly primitive
manner. And as is so often the case, an enduring and significant institution
received its name from a passing and incidental circumstance. For what later
evolved out of that students' sport and Perrot's bead-strung wires bears to
this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.

A bare two or three decades later the Game seems to have lost some of its pop-
ularity among students of music, but instead was taken over by mathematicians.
For a long while, indeed, a characteristic feature in the Game's history was
that it was constantly preferred, used, and further elaborated by whatever
branch of learning happened to be experiencing a period of high development
or a renaissance. The mathematicians brought the Game to a high degree of
flexibility and capacity for sublimation, so that it began to acquire some-
thing approaching a consciousness of itself and its possibilities. This pro-
cess paralleled the general evolution of cultural consciousness, which had
survived the great crisis and had, as Plinius Ziegenhalss puts it, "with mod-
est pride accepted the fate of belonging to a culture past its prime, as was
the case with the culture of late antiquity: Hellenistic culture in the Al-
exandrian Age."

So much for Ziegenhalss. We shall now attempt to sketch the further steps in
the history of the Glass Bead Game. Having passed from the musical to the
mathematical seminaries (a change which took place in France and England some-
what sooner than in Germany), the Game was so far developed that it was cap-
able of expressing mathematical processes by special symbols and abbrevia-
tions. The players, mutually elaborating these processes, threw these abstract
formulas at one another, displaying the sequences and possibilities of their
science. This mathematical and astronomical game of formulas required great
attentiveness, keenness, and concentration. Among mathematicians, even in
those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a
great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

At various times the Game was taken up and imitated by nearly all the scien-
tific and scholarly disciplines, that is, adapted to the special fields.
There is documented evidence for its application to the fields of classical
philology and logic. The analytical study of musical values had led to the
reduction of musical events to physical and mathematical formulas. Soon af-
terward philology borrowed this method and began to measure linguistic con-
figurations as physics measures processes in nature. The visual arts soon
followed suit, architecture having already led the way in establishing the
links between visual art and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new re-
lations, analogies, and correspondences were discovered among the abstract
formulas obtained in this way. Each discipline which seized upon the Game
created its own language of formulas, abbreviations, and possible combina-
tions. Everywhere, the elite intellectual youth developed a passion for
these Games, with their dialogues and progressions of formulas. The Game
was not mere practice and mere recreation; it became a form of concentrat-
ed self-awareness for intellectuals. Mathematicians in particular played
it with a virtuosity and formal strictness at once athletic and ascetic.
It afforded them a pleasure which somewhat compensated for their renunci-
ation of worldly pleasures and ambitions. For by then such renunciation
had already become a regular thing for intellectuals. The Glass Bead Game
contributed largely to the complete defeat of feuilletonism and to that
newly awakened delight in strict mental exercises to which we owe the o-
rigin of a new, monastically austere intellectual discipline.

The world had changed. The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton
might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength
in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to pruning
the plant back to the roots. The young people who now proposed to devote
themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attend-
ing a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties of-
fered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offer-
ed them the crumbs of what had once been higher education. Now they had
to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technici-
ans of the past, if not more so. They had a steep path to climb, had to
purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and scholastic ex-
ercises in Aristotelian philosophy. Moreover, they had to learn to renounce
all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered
worth striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public hon-
ors, the homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and
industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life. The writers with
heavy sales, Nobel Prizes, and lovely country houses, the celebrated physi-
cians with decorations and liveried servants, the professors with wealthy
wives and brilliant salons, the chemists with posts on boards of directors,
the philosophers with feuilleton factories who delivered charming lectures
in overcrowded halls, for which they were rewarded with thunderous applause
and floral tributes--all such public figures disappeared and have not come
back to this day. Even so, no doubt, there were still plenty of talented
young people for whom such personages were envied models. But the paths
to honors, riches, fame, and luxury now no longer led through lecture halls,
academies, and doctoral theses. The deeply debased intellectual professions
were bankrupt in the world's eyes. But in compensation they had regained
a fanatical and penitential devotion to art and thought. Those talented
persons whose desires tended more toward glory or comfortable living had
to turn their backs on the intellectual life, which had become so austere,
and seek out occupations which still provided opportunities for comfort
and money-making.

It would lead us too far afield to attempt to describe in detail how the
world of Mind, after its purification, won a place for itself in the State.
Experience soon showed that a few generations of lax and unscrupulous in-
tellectual discipline had also sufficed to inflict serious harm on practi-
cal life. Competence and responsibility had grown increasingly rare in all
the higher professions, including even those concerned with technology. To
remedy this, supervision of the things of the mind among the people and in
government came to be consigned more and more to the "intellectuals" in
the best sense of the word. This was particularly the case with the entire
educational system; and indeed the situation is little changed to this day.
In almost all the countries of Europe today the schools that are not still
administered by the Roman Church are in the hands of those anonymous Or-
ders which fill their ranks from the elite among the intellectuals. Al-
though public opinion occasionally decries the strictness and the reputed
arrogance of this caste, and although individuals have occasionally revolt-
ed against it, this leadership stands unshaken. Its integrity, its renun-
ciation of all benefits and advantages other than intellectual ones, main-
tains and protects it. But it is also supported by what has long since be-
come common knowledge, or at least a universal sense, that the continuance
of civilization depends on this strict schooling. People know, or dimly
feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the
world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon
cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks
and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will en-
sue. It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the
externals of civilization--technology, industry, commerce, and so on--also
require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.

To return now to the Glass Bead Game: what it lacked in those days was
the capacity for universality, for rising above all the disciplines. The astron-
omers, the classicists, the scholastics, the music students all played
their Games according to their ingenious rules, but the Game had a special
language and set of rules for every discipline and subdiscipline. It re-
quired half a century before the first step was taken toward spanning these
gulfs. The reason for this slowness was undoubtedly more moral than formal
and technical. The means for building the spans could even then have been
found, but along with the newly regenerated intellectual life went a pur-
itanical shrinking from "foolish digressions," from intermingling of dis-
ciplines and categories. There was also a profound and justified fear of
relapse into the sin of superficiality and feuilletonism.

It was the achievement of one individual which brought the Glass Bead Game
almost in one leap to an awareness of its potentialities, and thus to the
verge of its capacity for universal elaboration. And once again this ad-
vance was connected with music. A Swiss musicologist with a passion for
mathematics gave a new twist to the Game, and thereby opened the way for
its supreme development. This great man's name in civil life can no long-
er be ascertained; by his time the cult of personality in intellectual
fields had already been dispensed with. He lives on in history as Lusor
(or also, Joculator) Basiliensis. Although his invention, like all in-
ventions, was the product of his own personal merit and grace, it in no
way sprang solely from personal needs and ambitions, but was impelled by
a more powerful motive. There was a passionate craving among all the in-
tellectuals of his age for a means to express their new concepts. They
longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure
withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate.
Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and
tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new
alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate
and exchange their new intellectual experiences.

Testimony to the strength of this impulse may be found in the essay "Chi-
nese Warning Cry," by a Parisian scholar of those years. The author, mock-
ed by many in his day as a sort of Don Quixote (incidentally, he was a
distinguished scholar in the field of Chinese philology), pointed out the
dangers facing culture, in spite of its present honorable condition, if
it neglected to develop an international language of symbols. Such a lan-
guage, like the ancient Chinese script, should be able to express the most
complex matters graphically, without excluding individual imagination and
inventiveness, in such a way as to be understandable to all the scholars
of the world. It was at this point that Joculator Basiliensis applied him-
self to the problem. He invented for the Glass Bead Game the principles
of a new language, a language of symbols and formulas, in which mathema-
tics and music played an equal part, so that it became possible to combine
astronomical and musical formulas, to reduce mathematics and music to a
common denominator, as it were. Although what he did was by no means con-
clusive, this unknown man from Basel certainly laid the foundations for
all that came later in the history of our beloved Game.

The Glass Bead Game, formerly the specialized entertainment of mathe-
maticians in one era, philologists or musicians in another era, now more
and more cast its spell upon all true intellectuals. Many an old univ-
ersity, many a lodge, and especially the age-old League of Journeyers
to the East, turned to it. Some of the Catholic Orders likewise scent-
ed a new intellectual atmosphere and yielded to its lure. At some Ben-
edictine abbeys the monks devoted themselves to the Game so intensely
that even in those early days the question was hotly debated--it was
subsequently to crop up again now and then--whether this game ought to
be tolerated, supported, or forbidden by Church and Curia.

After Joculator Basiliensis' grand accomplishment, the Game rapidly ev-
olved into what it is today: the quintessence of intellectuality and art,
the sublime cult, the unio mystica of all separate members of the Univ-
ersitas Litterarum. In our lives it has partially taken over the role
of art, partially that of speculative philosophy. Indeed, in the days of
Plinius Ziegenhalss, for instance, it was often called by a different
name, one common in the literature of the Feuilletonistic Age. That name,
which for many a prophetic spirit in those days embodied a visionary i-
deal, was: Magic Theater.

For all that the Glass Bead Game had grown infinitely in technique and
range since its beginnings, for all the intellectual demands it made u-
pon its players, and for all that it had become a sublime art and science,
in the days of Joculator Basiliensis it still was lacking in an essen-
tial element. Up to that time every game had been a serial arrangement,
an ordering, grouping, and confronting of concentrated concepts from
many fields of thought and aesthetics, a rapid recollection of eternal
values and forms, a brief, virtuoso flight through the realms of the
mind. Only after some time did there enter into the Game, from the in-
tellectual stock of the educational system and especially from the hab-
its and customs of the Journeyers to the East, the idea of contemplation.

This new element arose out of an observed evil. Mnemonists, people with
freakish memories and no other virtues, were capable of playing dazzl-
ing games, dismaying and confusing the other participants by their rap-
id muster of countless ideas. In the course of time such displays of
virtuosity fell more and more under a strict ban, and contemplation be-
came a highly important component of the Game. Ultimately, for the au-
diences at each Game it became the main thing. This was the necessary
turning toward the religious spirit. What had formerly mattered was fol-
lowing the sequences of ideas and the whole intellectual mosaic of a
Game with rapid attentiveness, practiced memory, and full understanding.
But there now arose the demand for a deeper and more spiritual approach.
After each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player
was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, ori-
gin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organ-
ically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game asso-
ciations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them
from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation
was nurtured with the greatest care. In this way the hieroglyphs of the
Game were kept from degenerating into mere empty signs.

Hitherto, by the way, the Glass Bead Game, in spite of its popularity
among scholars, had remained a purely private form of exercise. It could
be played alone, by pairs, or by many, although unusually brilliant, well-
composed, and successful Games were sometimes written down and circulat-
ed from city to city and country to country for admiration or criticism.
Now, however, the Game slowly began to be enriched by a new function, for
it became a public ceremonial. To this day everyone is free to play the
Game privately, and young people are especially fond of doing so. But
nowadays virtually everyone associates the Glass Bead Game with ceremon-
ial public Games. They take place under the leadership of a few superior
Masters who are directly subordinate to the Ludi Magister, or Master of
the Game, of their country, with invited guests listening raptly, and a
wider audience all over the world following with closest attention. Some
of these Games last for days and weeks, and while such a Game is being
celebrated all the players and guests--obeying precepts which even govern
the length of time they are allowed to sleep--live an ascetic and self-
less life of absolute absorption, comparable to the strictly regulated
penitence required of the participants in one of St. Ignatius Loyola's
exercises.

There is scarcely any more we need add. Under the shifting hegemony of
now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into
a kind of universal language through which the players could express val-
ues and set these in relation to one another. Throughout its history the
Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeded according to
musical or mathematical rules. One theme, two themes, or three themes
were stated, elaborated, varied, and underwent a development quite simi-
lar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue or a concerto movement. A Game,
for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from
the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or
the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and
talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the
initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred
concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the
Game's symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for
some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the in-
itial theme into unlimited combinations. For a long time one school of
players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in
counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or
ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game
the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and
impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible
synthesis. In general, aside from certain brilliant exceptions, Games with
discordant, negative, or skeptical conclusions were unpopular and at times
actually forbidden. This followed directly from the meaning the Game had
acquired at its height for the players. It represented an elite, symbolic
form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that
Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself--in
other words, to God. Pious thinkers of earlier times had represented the
life of creatures, say, as a mode of motion toward God, and had consider-
ed that the variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ulti-
mate cognition only in the divine Unity. Similarly, the symbols and form-
ulas of the Glass Bead Game combined structurally, musically, and philos-
ophically within the framework of a universal language, were nourished by
all the sciences and arts, and strove in play to achieve perfection, pure
being, the fullness of reality. Thus, "realizing" was a favorite expression
among the players. They considered their Games a path from Becoming to Be-
ing, from potentiality to reality. We would like to remind the reader once
again of the sentences quoted above from Nicholas of Cues.

Incidentally, the terminology of Christian theology, or at any rate that
part of it which seemed to have become a part of the general cultural her-
itage, was naturally absorbed into the symbolic language of the Game. Thus
one of the principles of the Creed, a passage from the Bible, a phrase
from one of the Church Fathers, or from the Latin text of the Mass could
be expressed and taken into the Game just as easily and aptly as an axiom
of geometry or a melody of Mozart. We would scarcely be exaggerating if
we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game
players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship, although it delib-
erately eschewed developing any theology of its own.

In struggling for their continued existence in the midst of soulless world
powers, both the Glass Bead Game players and the Roman Church had become
too dependent upon each other for either to permit a decisive confronta-
tion between them, although that danger was always present, since the in-
tellectual honesty and the authentic impulse to reach incisive, unequivocal
formulations drove the partisans of both toward a parting of the ways.
That parting, however, never took place. Rome vacillated between a benevo-
lent and a hostile attitude toward the Game, for a good many of the most
talented persons in the Roman congregations, and in the ranks of the high
and the highest clergy, were players. And the Game itself, ever since pub-
lic matches and a Ludi Magister had been instituted, enjoyed the protect-
ion of the Order and of the education ministries, both of which always be-
haved with the greatest possible courtesy and chivalry toward Rome. Pope
Pius XV, who as a cardinal had been an excellent and ardent Glass Bead Game
player, as pontiff followed the example of all his predecessors in bidding
the Game farewell forever; but he went a step further and actually attempt-
ed to put the Game on trial. It was a near thing; had he carried out his
intention, Catholics would have been forbidden to play the Game. But the
pope died before matters came to that point, and a widely read biography
of this rather important man has represented his attitude toward the Glass
Bead Game as one of deep passion which in his pontifical office he could
vent only in the form of hostility.

The Game had been played freely by individuals and cliques, and for a long
time amiably promoted by the ministries of education, before it acquired
the status of a public institution. It was first organized as such in
France and England; other countries followed fairly rapidly. In each coun-
try a Game Commission and a supreme head of the Game, bearing the title of
Ludi Magister, were established. Official matches, played under the perso-
nal direction of the Magister, were exalted into cultural festivals. Like
all high functionaries in cultural life, the Magister of course remained
anonymous. Aside from a few intimates, no one knew his name. Official and
international communications media, such as radio and so on, were made a-
vailable only for the great official matches over which the Ludi Magister
personally presided. Among the duties of the Magister, in addition to con-
ducting the public Games, was supervision of the players and the schools of
the Game. Above all, however, the Magister had to keep strict watch over
the further elaboration of the Game. The World Commission of the Magist-
ers of all countries alone decided on the acceptance of new symbols and
formulas into the existing stock of the Game (which scarcely ever occurs
nowadays), on modifications of the rules, on the desirability of including
new fields within the purview of the Game. If the Game is regarded as a
kind of world language for thoughtful men, the Games Commissions of the
various countries under the leadership of their Magisters form as a whole
the Academy which guards the vocabulary, the development, and the purity
of this language. Each country's Commission possesses its Archive of the
Game, that is, the register of all hitherto examined and accepted symbols
and decipherments, whose number long ago by far exceeded the number of the
ancient Chinese ideographs.

In general, a passing grade in the final examination in one of the acade-
mies, especially one of the elite schools, is considered sufficient quali-
fication for a Glass Bead Game player; but in the past and to this day su-
perior competence in one of the principal fields of scholarship or in mu-
sic is tacitly assumed. To rise some day to membership in one of the Games
Commissions, or even to Ludi Magister, is the dream of almost every fif-
teen-year-old in the elite schools. But by the time these youth have become
doctoral candidates, only a tiny percentage still seriously cling to their
ambition to serve the Glass Bead Game and take an active part in its fur-
ther development. On the other hand, all these lovers of the Game diligent-
ly study the lore of the Game and practice meditation. At the "great" Games
they form that innermost ring of reverent and devoted participants which
gives the public matches their ceremonial character and keeps them from
devolving into mere aesthetic displays. To these real players and devotees,
the Ludi Magister is a prince or high priest, almost a deity.

But for every independent player, and especially for the Magister, the Glass
Bead Game is primarily a form of music-making, somewhat in the sense of those
words that Joseph Knecht once spoke concerning the nature of classical music:

"We consider classical music to be the epitome and quintessence of our cul-
ture, because it is that culture's clearest, most significant gesture and
expression. In this music we possess the heritage of classical antiquity and
Christianity, a spirit of serenely cheerful and brave piety, a superbly chi-
valric morality. For in the final analysis every important cultural gesture
comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a ges-
ture. As we know, between 1500 and 1800 a wide variety of music was made;
styles and means of expression were extremely variegated; but the spirit, or
rather the morality, was everywhere the same. The human attitude of which
classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on
the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory
over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tra-
gedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful
serenity. The grace of a minuet by Handel or Couperin, the sensuality subli-
mated into delicate gesture to be found in many Italian composers or in Mozart,
the tranquil, composed readiness for death in Bach--always there may be heard
in these works a defiance, a death-defying intrepidity, a gallantry, and a
note of superhuman laughter, of immortal gay serenity. Let that same note
also sound in our Glass Bead Games, and in our whole lives, acts, and suffer-
ings."

These words were noted down by one of Knecht's pupils. With them we bring to
an end our consideration of the Glass Bead Game.





THE LIFE OF MAGISTER LUDI JOSEPH KNECHT


　　　　　　　　　　　　　　ONE

　　　　　　　　　　　　THE CALL



NO KNOWLEDGE HAS COME down to us of Joseph Knecht's origins. Like
many other pupils of the elite schools, he either lost his parents early in
childhood, or the Board of Educators removed him from unfavorable home
conditions and took charge of him. In any case, he was spared the conflict
between elite school and home which complicates the youth of many other boys
of his type, makes entry into the Order more difficult, and in some cases
transforms highly gifted young people into problem personalities.

Knecht was one of those fortunates who seem born for Castalia, for the Order,
and for service in the Board of Educators. Although he was not spared the
perplexities of the life of the mind, it was given to him to experience without
personal bitterness the tragedy inherent in every life consecrated to thought.
Indeed, it is probably not so much this tragedy in itself that has tempted us to
delve so deeply into the personality of Joseph Knecht; rather, it was the tranquil,
cheerful, not to say radiant manner in which he brought his destiny and his
talents to fruition. Like every man of importance he had his daimonion and his
amor fati; but in him amor fati manifests itself to us free of somberness and
fanaticism. Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget
that the writing of history--however dryly it is done and however sincere the
desire for objectivity--remains literature. History's third dimension is always
fiction.

Thus, to select some examples of greatness, we have no idea whether Johann
Sebastian Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart actually lived in a cheerful or a
despondent manner. Mozart moves us with that peculiarly touching and endearing
grace of early blossoming and fading; Bach stands for the edifying and com-
forting submission to God's paternal plan of which suffering and dying form a
part. But we do not really read these qualities from their biographies and
from such facts about their private lives as have come down to us; we read
them solely from their works, from their music. Furthermore, although we know
Bach's biography and deduce his personality from his music, we involuntarily
include his posthumous destiny in the picture. We conceive him as living with
the knowledge, which causes him a silent smile, that all his work would be
forgotten after his death, that his manuscripts would be treated as so much
waste paper, that one of his sons instead of himself would be considered "the
great Bach," and harvest the success he himself merited, and that after his
work had been rediscovered it would be plunged into the misunderstandings and
barbarities of the Age of the Feuilleton, and so on. Similarly, we tend to
ascribe to Mozart, while still alive and flourishing, and producing his sound-
est work, some knowledge of his security in the hands of death, some premoni-
tion of the kindness with which death would embrace him. Where a body of work
exists, the historian cannot help himself; he must sum it up, along with the
life of the creator of that work, as two inseparable halves of a living unity.
So we do with Mozart or with Bach; so we also do with Knecht, although he be-
longs to our essentially uncreative era and has not left behind any body of
work of the same nature as those masters.

In attempting to trace the course of Knecht's life we are also attempting to
interpret it, and although as historians we must deeply regret the scantiness of
authenticated information on the last period of his life, we were nevertheless
encouraged to undertake the task precisely because this last part of Knecht's life
has become a legend. We have taken over this legend and adhere to its spirit,
whether or not it is merely a pious fiction. Just as we know nothing about
Knecht's birth and origins, we know nothing about his death. But we have not
the slightest reason for assuming that this death could have been a matter of
pure chance. We regard his life, insofar as it is known, as built up in a clear
succession of stages; and if in our speculations about its end we gladly accept the
legend and faithfully report it, we do so because what the legend tells us about
the last stage of his life seems to correspond fully with the previous stages.
We go so far as to admit that the manner in which his life drifts gently off into
legend appears to us organic and right, just as it imposes no strain on our
credulity to believe in the continued existence of a constellation that has
vanished below the horizon. Within the world in which we live--and by we I
mean the author of this present work and the reader--Joseph Knecht reached the
summit and achieved the maximum. As Magister Ludi he became the leader and
prototype of all those who strive toward and cultivate the things of the mind. He
administered and increased the cultural heritage that had been handed down to
him, for he was high priest of a temple that is sacred to each and every one of us.
But he did more than attain the realm of a Master, did more than fill the office at
the very summit of our hierarchy. He moved on beyond it; he grew out of it into
a dimension whose nature we can only reverently guess at. And for that very reason
it seems to us perfectly appropriate, and in keeping with his life, that his bio-
graphy should also have surpassed the usual dimensions and at the end passed on
into legend. We accept the miracle of this fact and rejoice in it without any in-
clination to pry into it interpretively. But insofar as Knecht's life is historical
--and it is that up to one specific day--we intend to treat it as such. It has been
our endeavor, therefore, to transmit the tradition exactly as it has been revealed
to us by our researches.

Concerning his childhood before he entered the elite schools, we know only a
single incident. It is, however, one of symbolic importance, for it signifies the
first great call of the realm of Mind to him, the voice of his vocation. And it is
characteristic that this first call came not from science or scholarship, but from
music. We owe this fragment of biography, as we do almost all the recollections
of Knecht's personal life, to the jottings of a pupil of the Glass Bead Game, a
loyal admirer who kept a record of many of the remarks and stories of his great
teacher.

Knecht must have been twelve or thirteen years old at the time. For quite a while
he had been a scholarship pupil in the Latin school of Berolfingen, a small town
on the fringes of the Zaberwald. Probably Berolfingen was also his birthplace.
His teachers at the school, and especially his music teacher, had already
recommended him two or three times to the highest Board for admission into the
elite schools. But Knecht knew nothing about this and had as yet had no
encounters with the elite or with any of the masters of the highest Board of
Educators. His music teacher, from whom he was learning violin and the lute,
told him that the Music Master would shortly be coming to Berolfingen to inspect
music instruction at the school. Therefore Joseph must practice like a good boy
and not embarrass his teacher.

The news stirred the boy deeply, for of course he knew quite well who the Music
Master was. He was not to be compared with the school inspectors who visited
twice a year, coming from somewhere in the higher reaches of the Board of
Educators. The Music Master was one of the twelve demigods, one of the twelve
supreme heads of this most respected of Boards. In all musical affairs he was the
supreme authority for the entire country. To think that the Music Master himself,
the Magister Musicae in person, would be coming to Berolfingen! There was
only one person in the world whom Joseph might have regarded as still more
legendary and mysterious: the Master of the Glass Bead Game.

Joseph was filled in advance with an enormous and timorous reverence for the
impending visitor. He imagined the Music Master variously as a king, as one of
the Twelve Apostles, or as one of the legendary great artists of classical
times, a Michael Praetorius or a Claudio Monteverdi, a J. J. Froberger or Johann
Sebastian Bach. And he looked forward with a joy as deep as his terror to the
appearance of this mighty star. That one of the demigods and archangels, one of
the mysterious and almighty regents of the world of thought, was to appear in
the flesh here in town and in the Latin school; that he was going to see him, and
that the Master might possibly speak to him, examine him, reprimand or praise
him, was a kind of miracle and rare prodigy in the skies. Moreover, as the
teachers assured him, this was to be the first time in decades that a Magister
Musicae in person would be visiting the town and the little Latin school. The
boy pictured the forthcoming event in a great variety of ways. Above all he
imagined a great public festival and a reception such as he had once experienced
when a new mayor had taken office, with brass bands and streets strung with
banners; there might even be fireworks. Knecht's schoolmates also had such
fantasies and hopes. His happy excitement was subdued only by the thought that
he himself might come too close to this great man, and that his playing and his
answers might be so bad that he would end up unbearably disgraced. But this
anxiety was sweet as well as tormenting. Secretly, without admitting it to
himself, he did not think the whole eagerly anticipated festival with its flags and
fireworks nearly so fine, so entrancing, important, and miraculously delightful as
the very possibility that he, little Joseph Knecht, would be seeing this man at
close quarters, that in fact the Master was paying this visit to Berolfingen just a
little on his, Joseph's, account--for he was after all coming to examine the state
of musical instruction, and the music teacher obviously thought it possible that
the Master would examine him as well.

But perhaps it would not come to that--alas, it probably would not. After all, it
was hardly possible. The Master would have better things to do than to listen to
a small boy's violin playing. He would probably want to see and hear only the
older, more advanced pupils.

Such were the boy's thoughts as he awaited the day. And the day, when it came,
began with a disappointment. No music blared in the streets, no flags and
garlands hung from the houses. As on every other day, Joseph had to gather up
his books and notebooks and go to the ordinary classes. And even in the
classroom there was not the slightest sign of decoration or festivity. Everything
was ordinary and normal. Class began; the teacher wore his everyday smock; he
made no speeches, did not so much as mention the great guest of honor.

But during the second or third hour the guest came nevertheless. There was a
knock at the door; the school janitor came in and informed the teacher that
Joseph Knecht was to present himself to the music teacher in fifteen minutes.
And he had better make sure that his hair was decently combed and his hands
and fingernails clean.

Knecht turned pale with fright. He stumbled from the classroom, ran to the
dormitory, put down his books, washed and combed his hair. Trembling, he took
his violin case and his book of exercises. With a lump in his throat, he made his
way to the music rooms in the annex. An excited schoolmate met him on the stairs,
pointed to a practice room, and told him: "You're supposed to wait here till they
call you."

The wait was short, but seemed to him an eternity. No one called him, but a man
entered the room. A very old man, it seemed to him at first, not very tall, white
haired, with a fine, clear face and penetrating, light-blue eyes. The gaze of those
eyes might have been frightening, but they were serenely cheerful as well as
penetrating, neither laughing nor smiling, but filled with a calm, quietly radiant
cheerfulness. He shook hands with the boy, nodded, and sat down with delibera-
tion on the stool in front of the old practice piano. "You are Joseph Knecht?" he
said. "Your teacher seems content with you. I think he is fond of you. Come, let's
make a little music together."

Knecht had already taken out his violin. The old man struck the A, and the boy
tuned. Then he looked inquiringly, anxiously, at the Music Master.

"What would you like to play?" the Master asked.

The boy could not say a word. He was filled to the brim with awe of the old
man. Never had he seen a person like this. Hesitantly, he picked up his exercise
book and held it out to the Master.

"No," the Master said, "I want you to play from memory, and not an exercise but
something easy that you know by heart. Perhaps a song you like."

Knecht was confused, and so enchanted by this face and those eyes that he could
not answer. He was deeply ashamed of his confusion, but unable to speak. The
Master did not insist. With one finger, he struck the first notes of a melody, and
looked questioningly at the boy. Joseph nodded and at once played the melody
with pleasure. It was one of the old songs which were often sung in school.

"Once more," the Master said.

Knecht repeated the melody, and the old man now played a second voice to go
with it.

Now the old song rang through the small practice room in two parts.

"Once more."

Knecht played, and the Master played the second part, and a third part also. Now
the beautiful old song rang through the room in three parts.

"Once more." And the Master played three voices along with the melody.

"A lovely song," the Master said softly. "Play it again, in the alto this time."

The Master gave him the first note, and Knecht played, the Master accompanying
with the other three voices. Again and again the Master said, "Once more," and
each time he sounded merrier. Knecht played the melody in the tenor, each time
accompanied by two or three parts. They played the song many times, and with
every repetition the song was involuntarily enriched with embellishments and
variations. The bare little room resounded festively in the cheerful light of
the forenoon.

After a while the old man stopped. "Is that enough?" he asked. Knecht shook his
head and began again. The Master chimed in gaily with his three voices, and the
four parts drew their thin, lucid lines, spoke to one another, mutually supported,
crossed, and wove around one another in delightful windings and figurations.
The boy and the old man ceased to think of anything else; they surrendered
themselves to the lovely, congenial lines and figurations they formed as their
parts crisscrossed. Caught in the network their music was creating, they swayed
gently along with it, obeying an unseen conductor. Finally, when the melody had
come to an end once more, the Master turned his head and asked: "Did you like
that, Joseph?"

Gratefully, his face glowing, Knecht looked at him. He was radiant, but still
speechless.

"Do you happen to know what a fugue is?" the Master now asked.

Knecht looked dubious. He had already heard fugues, but had not yet studied
them in class.

"Very well," the Master said, "then I'll show you. You'll grasp it quicker if we
make a fugue ourselves. Now then, the first thing we need for a fugue is a theme,
and we don't have to look far for the theme. We'll take it from our song."

He played a brief phrase, a fragment of the song's melody. It sounded strange,
cut out in that way, without head or tail. He played the theme once more, and
this time he went on to the first entrance; the second entrance changed the
interval of a fifth to a fourth; the third repeated the first an octave higher,
as did the fourth with the second. The exposition concluded with a cadence in the
key of the dominant. The second working-out modulated more freely to other keys;
the third, tending toward the subdominant, ended with a cadence on the tonic.

The boy looked at the player's clever white fingers, saw the course of the
development faintly mirrored in his concentrated expression, while his eyes
remained quiet under half-closed lids. Joseph's heart swelled with veneration,
with love for the Master. His ear drank in the fugue; it seemed to him that he
was hearing music for the first time in his life. Behind the music being creat-
ed in his presence he sensed the world of Mind, the joy-giving harmony of law and
freedom, of service and rule. He surrendered himself, and vowed to serve that
world and this Master. In those few minutes he saw himself and his life, saw the
whole cosmos guided, ordered, and interpreted by the spirit of music. And when
the playing had come to an end, he saw this magician and king for whom he felt
so intense a reverence pause for a little while longer, slightly bowed over the
keys, with half-closed eyes, his face softly glowing from within. Joseph did not
know whether he ought to rejoice at the bliss of this moment, or weep because it
was over.

The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful
blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon
him, and said: "Making music together is the best way for two people to become
friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall
remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph."

He shook hands with Joseph and took his leave. But in the doorway he turned
once more and gave Joseph a parting greeting, with a look and a ceremonious
little inclination of his head.

Many years later Knecht told his pupil that when he stepped out of the building,
he found the town and the world far more transformed and enchanted than if
there had been flags, garlands, and streamers, or displays of fireworks. He had
experienced his vocation, which may surely be spoken of as a sacrament. The
ideal world, which hitherto his young soul had known only by hearsay and in
wild dreams, had suddenly taken on visible lineaments for him. Its gates had
opened invitingly. This world, he now saw, did not exist only in some vague,
remote past or future; it was here and was active; it glowed, sent messengers,
apostles, ambassadors, men like this old Magister (who by the way was not
nearly so old as he then seemed to Joseph). And through this venerable
messenger an admonition and a call had come from that world even to him, the
insignificant Latin school pupil.

Such was the meaning of the experience for him. It took weeks before he act-
ually realized, and was convinced, that the magical events of that sacramental
hour corresponded to a precise event in the real world, that the summons was
not just a sense of happiness and admonition in his own soul and his own con-
science, but a show of favor and an exhortation from the earthly powers. For
in the long run it could not be concealed that the Music Master's visit had been
neither a matter of chance nor a real inspection of the school. Rather, Knecht's
name had stood for some time on the lists of pupils who seemed deserving of
education in the elite school. At any rate, on the basis of his teachers' re-
ports he had been so recommended to the Board of Educators. The boy had been
recommended for good character and as a Latinist, but the highest praise had
come from his music teacher. Therefore the Music Master had chosen to stop off
for a few hours in Berolfingen, in the course of an official mission, in order to
see this pupil. In his examination he was not so much interested in Joseph's Latin
or his fingering (in these matters he relied on the teachers' reports, which he
nevertheless spent an hour going over) as whether the boy had it in him by
nature to become a musician in the higher sense of the word, whether he had the
capacity for enthusiasm, subordination, reverence, worshipful service. As a rule,
and for very good reasons, the teachers in the public schools were anything but
liberal in their recommendations of pupils for the "elite." Nevertheless, now
and then someone would be pushed out of more or less unsavory motives. Quite
often, too, from sheer lack of insight a teacher would stubbornly recommend
some pet pupil who had few virtues aside from diligence, ambition, and a certain
shrewdness in his conduct toward the teachers. The Music Master particularly
disliked this kind of boy. He could tell at once whether a pupil was aware that
his future career was at stake, and woe to the boy who approached him too ad-
roitly, too cannily, too cleverly, let alone one who tried to flatter him. In a good
many cases such candidates were rejected without even an examination.

Knecht, on the other hand, had delighted the old Music Master. He had liked him
very much. As he continued his journey he recalled the boy with pleasure. He
had made no notes and entered no marks for him in his notebook, but he took
with him the memory of the unspoiled, modest boy, and upon his return he
inscribed his name in his own hand on the list of pupils who had been examined
personally by a member of the Board of Educators and been found worthy of
admission.

Joseph had occasionally heard talk in school about this list, and in a great
variety of tones. The pupils called it "the golden book," but sometimes they
disrespectfully referred to it as the "climbers' catalogue." Whenever a teacher
mentioned the list--if only to remind a pupil that a lout like him could never
hope to win a place on it--there would be a note of solemnity, of respect, and
also of self-importance in his voice. But if the pupils mentioned the catalogue,
they usually spoke in a jeering tone and with somewhat exaggerated indifference.
Once Joseph had heard a schoolmate say: "Go on, what do I care about that stupid
climbers' catalogue. You won't see a regular feller's name on it, that's one
sure thing. The teachers keep it for all the worst grinds and creeps."

A curious period followed Joseph's wonderful experience with the Music
Master. He still did not know that he now belonged to the electi, to the flos
juventutis, as the elite pupils were called in the Order. At first it did not
enter his mind that there might be practical consequences and tangible effects
of the episode upon his general destiny or his daily life.

While for his teachers he was already marked by distinction and on the verge of
departure, he himself was conscious of his call almost entirely as a process
within himself. Even so, it made a clear dividing line in his life. Although the
hour with the sorcerer (as he often thought of the Music Master) had only
brought to fruition, or brought closer, something he had already sensed in his
own heart, that hour nevertheless clearly separated the past from the present
and the future--just as an awakened dreamer, even if he wakes up in the same
surroundings that he has seen in his dream, cannot really doubt that he is
now awake. There are many types and kinds of vocation, but the core of the
experience is always the same: the soul is awakened by it, transformed or
exalted, so that instead of dreams and presentiments from within a summons
comes from without. A portion of reality presents itself and makes its claim.

In this case the portion of reality had been the Music Master. This remote,
venerated demigod, this archangel from the highest spheres of heaven, had
appeared in the flesh. Joseph had seen his omniscient blue eyes. He had sat
on the stool at the practice piano, had made music with Joseph, made music
wonderfully; almost without words he had shown him what music really was,
had blessed him, and vanished.

For the present Joseph was incapable of reflecting on possible practical
consequences, on all that might flow out of this event, for he was much too
preoccupied with the immediate reverberations of it within himself. Like a
young plant hitherto quietly and intermittently developing which suddenly
begins to breathe harder and to grow, as though in a miraculous hour it has
become aware of the law which shapes it and begins to strive toward the
fulfillment of its being, the boy, touched by the magician's hand, began rapidly
and eagerly to gather and tauten his energies. He felt changed, growing; he
felt new tensions and new harmonies between himself and the world. There were
times, now, in music, Latin, and mathematics, when he could master tasks that
were still far beyond his age and the scope of his schoolmates. Sometimes
he felt capable of any achievements. At other times he might forget everything
and daydream with a new softness and surrender, listen to the wind or the
rain, gaze into the chalice of a flower or the moving waters of the river,
understanding nothing, divining everything, lost in sympathy, curiosity, the
craving to comprehend, carried away from his own self toward another, toward
the world, toward the mystery and sacrament, the at once painful and lovely
disporting of the world of appearances.

Thus, beginning from within and growing toward the meeting and confirmation
of self and world, the vocation of Joseph Knecht developed in perfect purity.
He passed through all its stages, tasted all its joys and anxieties. Unham-
pered by sudden revelations and indiscretions, the sublime process moved to
its conclusion. His was the typical evolution of every noble mind; working and
growing harmoniously and at the same tempo, the inner self and the outer world
approached each other. At the end of these developments the boy became aware
of his situation and of the fate that awaited him. He realized that his teachers
were treating him like a colleague, even like a guest of honor whose departure is
expected at any moment, and that his schoolmates were half admiring or envying
him, half avoiding or even distrusting him. Some of his enemies now openly
mocked and hated him, and he found himself more and more separated from and
deserted by former friends. But by then the same process of separation and
isolation had been completed within himself. His own feelings had taught him to
regard the teachers more and more as associates rather than superiors; his former
friends had become temporary companions of the road, now left behind. He no
longer felt that he was among equals in his school and his town. He was no
longer in the right place. Everything he had known had become permeated by
a hidden death, a solvent of unreality, a sense of belonging to the past. It
had all become a makeshift, like worn-out clothing that no longer fitted.
And as the end of his stay at the Latin school approached, this slow outgrow-
ing of a beloved and harmonious home town, this shedding of a way of life no
longer right for him, this living on the verge of departure--interspersed
though the mood of parting was by moments of supreme rejoicing and radiant
self-assurance--became a terrible torment to him, an almost intolerable
pressure and suffering. For everything was slipping from him without his
being sure that it was not really himself who was abandoning everything.
He could not say whether he should not be blaming himself for this perish-
ing and estrangement of his dear and accustomed world. Perhaps he had killed
it by ambition, by arrogance, by pride, by disloyalty and lack of love. Among
the pangs inherent in a genuine vocation, these are the bitterest. One who
has received the call takes, in accepting it, not only a gift and a command-
ment, but also something akin to guilt. Similarly, the soldier who is snatched
from the ranks of his comrades and raised to the status of officer is the worth-
ier of promotion, the more he pays for it with a feeling of guilty conscience
toward his comrades.

Joseph Knecht, however, had the good fortune to go through this evolution
undisturbed and in utter innocence. When at last the faculty informed him of his
distinction and his impending admission to the elite schools, he was for the
moment completely surprised, although a moment later this novelty seemed to
him something he had long known and been expecting. Yet only now did he
recall that for weeks the word electus, or "elite boy," had now and again been
sneeringly called out behind his back. He had heard it, but only half heard, and
had never imagined it as anything but a taunt. He had taken it to mean not that
his schoolmates were actually calling him an electus, but that they were jeering:
"You're so stuck up you think you're an electus ." Occasionally he had suffered
from the gulf that had opened between himself and his schoolmates, but in fact
he would never have considered himself an electus. He had become conscious of
the call not as a rise in rank, but only as an inward admonition and encourage-
ment. And yet--in spite of everything, had he not known it all along, divined
it, felt it again and again? Now it had come; his raptures were confirmed,
made legitimate; his suffering had had meaning; the clothing he had worn, by
now unbearably old and too tight, could be discarded at last. A new suit was
waiting for him.


With his admission into the elite, Knecht's life was transferred to a different
plane. The first and decisive step in his development had been taken. It is by no
means the rule for all elite pupils that official admission to the elite coincides
with the inner experience of vocation. That is a matter of grace, or to put it
in banal terms, sheer good fortune. The young man to whom it does happen starts
out with an advantage, just as it is an advantage to be endowed with felicitous
qualities of body and soul. Almost all elite pupils regard their election as a
piece of great good fortune, a distinction they are proud of, and a great many
of them have previously felt an ardent longing for that distinction. But for
most of the elect the transition from the ordinary schools of their home towns
to the schools of Castalia comes harder than they had imagined, and entails a
good many unexpected disappointments. Especially for pupils who were happy and
loved in their homes, the change represents a very difficult parting and renun-
ciation. The result is a rather considerable number of transfers back home, es-
pecially during the first two elite years. The reason for these is not a lack
of talent and industry, but the inability of the pupils to adapt to boarding-
school life and to the idea of more and more severing their ties to family and
home until ultimately they would cease to know and to respect any allegiance
other than to the Order.

On the other hand, there were occasionally pupils for whom admission to the
elite schools meant above all freedom from home or an oppressive school, from
an oversevere father, say, or a disagreeable teacher. These youngsters breathed
easier for a while, but they had expected such vast and impossible changes in
their whole life that disillusionment soon followed.

The real climbers and model pupils, the young pedants, could also not always
hold their own in Castalia. Not that they would have been unable to cope with
their studies. But in the elite, studies and marks were not the only criterion.
There were other pedagogical and artistic goals which sometimes proved too
much for such pupils. Nevertheless, within the system of four great elite schools
with their numerous subdivisions and branch institutions there was room for a
great variety of talents, and an aspiring mathematician or a student of languages
and literatures, if he really had the makings of a scholar, would not be misprized
for a lack of musical or philosophical talent. Even in Castalia, in fact, there were
at times very strong tendencies toward cultivation of the pure, sober disciplines,
and the advocates of such tendencies not only denigrated the "visionaries," that
is, the devotees of music and the other arts, but even sometimes went so far as to
forswear and ban, within their own circle, everything artistic, and especially the
Glass Bead Game.

Since all that is known to us of Knecht's life took place in Castalia, in that most
tranquil and serene region of our mountainous country, which in the old days
used to be called, in the poet Goethe's phrase, "the pedagogical province," we
shall at the risk of boring the reader with matters long familiar once more briefly
sketch the character of famous Castalia and the structure of her schools. These
schools, for brevity known as the elite schools, constitute a wise and flexible
system by means of which the administration (a Council of Studies consisting of
twenty councillors, ten representing the Board of Educators and ten representing
the Order) draws candidates from among the most gifted pupils in the various
sections and schools of the country, in order to supply new generations for the
Order and for all the important offices in the secondary school system and the
universities. The multitude of ordinary schools, gymnasia, and other schools in
the country, whether technical or humanistic in character, are for more than
ninety per cent of our students preparatory schools for the professions. They
terminate with an entrance examination for the university. At the university there
is a specific course of study for each subject. Such is the standard curriculum for
our students, as everyone knows. These schools make reasonably strict demands
and do their best to exclude the untalented.

But alongside or above these schools we have the system of elite schools, to
which only the pupils of extraordinary gifts and character are admitted. Entrance
to them is not controlled by examinations. Instead, the elite pupils are chosen by
their teachers, according to their judgment, and are recommended to the
Castalian authorities. One day a teacher suggests to a child of eleven or twelve
that if he wished he could perhaps enter one of the Castalian schools next
semester. Does he feel attracted by the idea; does he feel any vocation for it?
The boy is given time to think it over. If he then agrees, and if the unqualified
consent of both parents is obtained, one of the elite schools admits him on
probation. The directors and the highest-level teachers of these elite schools (by
no means the faculties of the universities) form the Board of Educators, which
has charge of all education and all intellectual organizations in the country. Once
a boy becomes an elite pupil (and assuming he does not fail any of the courses,
in which case he is sent back to the ordinary schools) he no longer has to prepare
for a profession or some specialty that will subsequently become his livelihood.
Rather, the Order and the hierarchy of academics are recruited from among the
elite pupils, everyone from the grammar school teachers to the highest officers,
the twelve Directors of Studies, also called Masters, and the Ludi Magister, the
director of the Glass Bead Game.

As a rule, the last courses in the elite schools are completed between the
ages of twenty-two and twenty-five. The graduate is then admitted to the Order.
Thereafter, all educational and research institutions of the Order and of the
Board of Educators are available to the former elite pupils, all the libraries,
archives, laboratories, and so on, together with a large staff of teachers if they
desire further study, and all the facilities of the Glass Bead Game. A degree of
specialization begins even during the school years. In the upper ranges of the
elite schools those who show special aptitudes for languages, philosophy,
mathematics, or whatever are shifted to the curriculum which provides the best
nourishment for their talents. Most of these pupils end up as subject teachers
in the public schools and universities. They remain, even though they have left
Castalia, members of the Order for life. That is to say, they stand at an austere
remove from the "normals" (those who were not educated in the elite schools)
and can never--unless they resign the Order--become professional men, such as
doctors, lawyers, engineers, and so on. They are subject for life to the rules
of the Order, which include poverty and bachelorhood. The common people call
them in a half-derisive, half-respectful tone "the mandarins."

Thus the bulk of former elite pupils find their ultimate destiny as school-
masters. The tiny remainder, the top flight of the Castalian schools, can devote
themselves to free study for as long as they please. A contemplative, diligent
intellectual life is reserved for them. Many a highly gifted person who for one
reason or another, perhaps some physical defect or quirk of character, is not
suited to become a teacher or to hold a responsible post in the superior or
inferior Boards of Educators, may go on studying, researching, or collecting
throughout his life as a pensioner of the authorities. His contribution to society
then consists mostly of works of pure scholarship. Some are placed as advisers
to dictionary committees, archives, libraries, and so on; others pursue schol-
arship as art for art's sake. A good many of them have devoted their lives to
highly abstruse and sometimes peculiar subjects, such as Lodovicus Crudelis
who toiled for thirty years translating all extant ancient Egyptian texts into
both Greek and Sanscrit, or the somewhat peculiar Chattus Calvensis II who has
bequeathed to us four immense folio volumes on The Pronunciation of Latin in
the Universities of Southern Italy toward the End of the Twelfth Century. This
work was intended as Part One of a History of the Pronunciation of Latin from
the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries. But in spite of its one thousand
manuscript pages, it has remained a fragment, for no one has carried on the
work.

It is understandable that there has been a good deal of joking about purely
learned works of this type. Their actual value for the future of scholarship and
for the people as a whole cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, scholarship, as
was true for art in the olden days, must indeed have far-flung grazing grounds,
and in pursuit of a subject which interests no one but himself a scholar can
accumulate knowledge which provides colleagues with information as valuable
as that stored in a dictionary or an archive.

As far as possible, scholarly works such as the above-mentioned were printed.
The real scholars were left in almost total freedom to ply their studies and
their Games, and no one objected that a good many of their works seemed to
bring no immediate benefits to the people or the community and, inevitably,
seemed to nonscholars merely luxurious frivolities. A good many of these schol-
ars have been smiled at for the nature of their studies, but none has ever been
reproved, let alone had his privileges withdrawn. Nor were they merely toler-
ated; they enjoyed the respect of the populace, in spite of being the butts of
many jokes. This respect was founded on the sacrifice with which all members of
the scholarly community paid for their intellectual privileges. They had many
amenities; they had a modest allotment of food, clothing, and shelter; they
had splendid libraries, collections, and laboratories at their disposal.
But in return they renounced lush living, marriage, and family. As a monastic
community they were excluded from competition in the world. They owned no
property, received no titles and honors, and in material things had to content
themselves with a very simple life. If one wanted to expend the years of his life
deciphering a single ancient inscription, he was free to do so, and would even be
helped. But if he desired good living, rich clothing, money, or titles, he found
these things inexorably barred. Those for whom such gratifications were important
usually returned to "the world" quite young; they became paid teachers or tutors
or journalists; they married or in other ways sought out a life to suit their
tastes.


When the time came for Joseph Knecht to leave Berolfingen, it was his music
teacher who accompanied him to the railroad station. Saying good-by to this
teacher was painful, and his heart also swelled a little with a feeling of loneliness
and uncertainty after the train started and the whitewashed stepped gable of the
old castle tower dropped out of sight and did not reappear. Many another pupil
has set out on this first journey with far more turbulent feelings, frightened and
in tears. Joseph had inwardly already transferred his allegiance; he withstood the
journey well. And he did not have far to go.

He had been assigned to the Eschholz school. There had been pictures of this
school hanging in his principal's office. Eschholz was the largest and the new-
est complex of schools in Castalia. The buildings were all modern. There was
no town in the vicinity, only a village-like small settlement set among woods.
Beyond the settlement the school spread out, wide, level, and cheerful, the
buildings enclosing a large open quadrangle. In the center of the quadrangle,
arranged like the five on a die, five enormous, stately trees raised their dark
cones to the sky. The huge rectangle was partly in lawn, partly in gravel, its
expanse broken only by two large swimming pools, fed by running water. Wide,
shallow steps led down to the pools. At the entrance to this sunny plaza stood
the schoolhouse, the only tall building in the complex. There were two wings,
each flanked by a five-columned portico. All the rest of the buildings enclos-
ing the quadrangle were very low, flat, and unadorned, divided into perfectly
equal sections, each of which led out into the plaza through an arcade and down
a low flight of steps. Pots of flowers stood in the openings of most of the
arcades.

In keeping with Castalian custom, Joseph was not received by a school attendant
and taken to a principal or a committee of teachers. Instead, a schoolmate met
him, a tall, good-looking boy in clothes of blue linen, a few years older than
Joseph. He shook hands, saying, "My name is Oscar; I'm the senior boy in Hellas
House, where you will be living. I've been assigned to welcome you and show you
around. You're not expected to attend classes until tomorrow, so we have plenty
of time to look around. You'll get the hang of things soon enough. And until
you have become adjusted, please consider me your friend and mentor, and your
protector as well, in case some of the fellows bother you. There are always some
who think they have to haze the new boys a little. But it won't be bad, take it
from me. I'll show you Hellas House first, so you'll see where you're going to
live."

Thus, in the traditional fashion, Oscar greeted the newcomer; the housemaster
had appointed him Joseph's mentor, and he in fact made an effort to play his part
well. It is, after all, a part the seniors usually find congenial, and if a fif-
teenyear-old takes the trouble to charm a thirteen-year-old by employing a tone
of affable comradeship with a touch of patronage, he will almost always succeed.
During Joseph's first few days his mentor treated him like a guest whom a
courteous host pampers in the hope that he will, should he happen to depart
the next day, take away with him a good impression of host and house.

Joseph was shown to a room which he would be sharing with two other boys. He
was served rusks and a cup of fruit juice. He was shown the whole of Hellas
House, one of the dormitories of the large quadrangle; he was shown where to
hang his towel in the steam bath, and in which corner he was allowed to keep
potted plants, if he wanted them. Before evening fell he was also taken to the
launderer at the washhouse, where a blue linen suit was selected and fitted for
him.

From the very first Joseph felt at ease in the place. He gaily fell in with Oscar's
tone and showed only the slightest trace of bashfulness, although he naturally
regarded this older boy, who had obviously been at home in Castalia for a long
time, as something of a demigod. He even enjoyed the bits of showing-off, as when
Oscar would weave a complicated Greek quotation into his talk only to recall pol-
itely that the new boy of course couldn't understand, naturally not, how could he
be expected to!

In any case, life at a boarding school was nothing new to Joseph. He fitted in
without difficulty. For that matter, no important events of his years at Eschholz
have been recorded. The terrible fire in the schoolhouse must have happened after
his time. Portions of his scholastic record have been traced; they show that he
occasionally had the highest marks in music and Latin, and somewhat above average
in mathematics and Greek. Now and then there are entries about him in the "House
Book," such as "ingenium valde capax, studia non angusta, mores probantur" or
"ingenium felix et profectuum avidissimum, moribus placet officiosis." What pun-
ishments he received at Eschholz can no longer be determined; the disciplinary
register was lost in the fire, along with so much else. There is the testimony
of a fellow pupil that during the four years at Eschholz Knecht was punished on-
ly once (by being excluded from the weekly outing), and that his demerit had
consisted in obstinately refusing to name a schoolmate who had done something
against the rules. The anecdote sounds plausible. Knecht undoubtedly was always
a good comrade and never servile toward his superiors. Nevertheless, it seems
highly unlikely that this was actually his sole punishment in four years.

Since our data on Knecht's early period in the elite school are so sparse, we
cite a passage from one of his later lectures on the Glass Bead Game. Knecht's
own manuscripts of these lectures for beginners are not available, it should be
noted; he delivered them extemporaneously, and a pupil took them down in short-
hand. At one point Knecht speaks about analogies and associations in the Glass
Bead Game, and in regard to the latter distinguishes between "legitimate," uni-
versally comprehensible associations and those that are "private" or subjective.
He remarks: "To give you an example of private associations that do not forfeit
their private value although they have no place in the Glass Bead Game, I shall
tell you of one such association that goes back to my own schooldays. I was a-
bout fourteen years old, and it was the season when spring is already in the air,
February or March. One afternoon a schoolmate invited me to go out with him to
cut a few elder switches. He wanted to use them as pipes for a model water mill.
We set out, and it must have been an unusually beautiful day in the world or in
my own mind, for it has remained in my memory, and vouchsafed me a little exper-
ience. The ground was wet, but free of snow; strong green shoots were already
breaking through on the edge of streams. Buds and the first opening catkins were
already lending a tinge of color to the bare bushes, and the air was full of
scent, a scent imbued with life and with contradictions. There were smells of
damp soil, decaying leaves, and young growth; any moment one expected to smell
the first violets although there were none yet.

"We came to the elder bushes. They had tiny buds, but no leaves, and as I cut off
a twig, a powerful, bittersweet scent wafted toward me. It seemed to gather and
multiply all the other smells of spring within itself. I was completely stunned by
it; I smelled my knife, smelled my hand, smelled the elder twig. It was the sap
that gave off so insistent and irresistible a fragrance. We did not talk about it,
but my friend also thoughtfully smelled for a long time. The fragrance meant
something to him also.

"Well now, every experience has its element of magic. In this case the onset of
spring, which had enthralled me as I walked over the wet, squishing meadows
and smelled the soil and the buds, had now been concentrated into a sensual
symbol by the fortissimo of that elder shrub's fragrance. Possibly I would never
have forgotten this scent even if the experience had remained isolated. Rather,
every future encounter with that smell deep into my old age would in all
probability have revived the memory of that first time I had consciously
experienced the fragrance. But now a second element entered in. At that time I
had found an old volume of music at my piano teacher's. It was a volume of
songs by Franz Schubert, and it exerted a strong attraction upon me. I had leafed
through it one time when I had a rather long wait for the teacher, and had asked
to borrow it for a few days. In my leisure hours I gave myself up to the ecstasy
of discovery. Up to that time I had not known Schubert at all, and I was totally
captivated by him. And now, on the day of that walk to the elderberry bush or
the day after, I discovered Schubert's spring song, "Die linden Lüfte sind
erwacht," and the first chords of the piano accompaniment assailed me like
something already familiar. Those chords had exactly the same fragrance as the
sap of the young elder, just as bittersweet, just as strong and compressed, just as
full of the forthcoming spring. From that time on the association of earliest
spring, fragrance of elder, Schubert chords has been fixed and absolutely valid,
for me. As soon as the first chord is struck I immediately smell the tartness of
the sap, and both together mean to me: spring is on the way.

"This private association of mine is a precious possession I would not willingly
give up. But the fact that two sensual experiences leap up every time I think,
'spring is coming'--that fact is my own personal affair. It can be communicated,
certainly, as I have communicated it to you just now. But it cannot be transmit-
ted. I can make you understand my association, but I cannot so affect a single
one of you that my private association will become a valid symbol for you in your
turn, a mechanism which infallibly reacts on call and always follows the same
course."

One of Knecht's fellow pupils, who later rose to the rank of First Archivist of
the Glass Bead Game, maintained that Knecht on the whole had been a merry boy,
though without a trace of boisterousness. When playing music he would sometimes
have a wonderfully rapt, blissful expression. He was rarely seen in an excited
or passionate mood, except at the rhythmic ball game, which he loved. But there
were times when this friendly, healthy boy attracted attention, and gave rise
to mockery or anxiety. This happened when pupils were dismissed, a fairly fre-
quent occurrence in the lower classes of the elite schools. The first time
a classmate was missing from classes and games, did not return next day, and
word went around that he was not sick but dismissed, had already departed and
would not be returning, Knecht was more than subdued. For days on end he
seemed to be distraught.

Years later he himself commented on this matter: "Every time a pupil was sent
back from Eschholz and left us, I felt as if someone had died. If I had been asked
the reason for my sorrow, I would have said that I felt pity for the poor fellow
who had spoiled his future by frivolity and laziness, and that there was also an
element of anxiety in my feeling, fear that this might possibly happen to me
some day. Only after I had experienced the same thing many times, and basically
no longer believed that the same fate could overtake me as well, did I begin to
see somewhat more deeply into the matter. I then no longer felt the expulsion of
an electus merely as a misfortune and punishment. I came to realize that the
dismissed boys in a good many cases were quite glad to be returning home. I felt
that it was no longer solely a matter of judgment and punishment, but that the
'world' out there, from which we electi had all come once upon a time, had not
abruptly ceased to exist as it had seemed to me. Rather, for a good many among
us it remained a great and attractive reality which tempted and ultimately
recalled these boys. And perhaps it was that not only for individuals, but for all
of us; perhaps it was by no means only the weaker and inferior souls upon whom
the remote world exerted so strong an attraction. Possibly the apparent relapse
they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and
a positive act. Perhaps we who were so good about remaining in Eschholz were
in fact the weaklings and the cowards."

As we shall see, these thoughts were to return to him, and very forcefully.

Every encounter with the Music Master was a great joy to him. The Master came
to Eschholz once every two or three months at least to supervise the music
classes. He also frequently stayed a few days as the guest of one of the teachers
who was a close friend. Once he personally conducted the final rehearsals for the
performance of a vesper by Monteverdi. But above all he kept an eye on the
more talented of the music pupils, and Knecht was among the honored recipients
of his paternal friendship. Every so often he would sit at the piano with Joseph
in one of the practice rooms and go through the works of his favorite composers
with him, or else play over a classical example from one of the old handbooks on
the theory of composition. "To construct a canon with the Music Master, or to
hear him develop a badly constructed one to its absurd logical conclusion,
frequently had about it a solemnity, or I might also say, a gaiety, like nothing
else in the world. Sometimes one could scarcely contain one's tears, and
sometimes one could not stop laughing. One emerged from a private music
lesson with him as from a bath or a massage."

Knecht's schooldays at Eschholz at last drew to a close. Along with a dozen or so
other pupils of his level he was to be transferred to a school on the next stage or
level. The principal delivered the usual speech to these candidates, describing
once again the significance and the rules of the Castalian schools and more or
less sketching for the graduates, in the name of the Order, the path they would
be traveling, at the end of which they would be qualified to enter the Order
themselves. This solemn address was part of the program for a day of ceremonies
and festivities during which teachers and fellow pupils alike treat the graduates
like guests. On such days there are always carefully prepared performances--this
time it was a great seventeenth-century cantata--and the Music Master had come
in order to hear it.

After the principal's address, while everyone was on the way to the bravely
bedecked dining hall, Knecht approached the Master with a question. "The
principal," he said, "told us how things are outside of Castalia, in the ordinary
schools and colleges. He said that the students at the universities study for the
'free' professions. If I understood him rightly, these are professions we do not
even have here in Castalia. What is the meaning of that? Why are just those
professions called 'free'? And why should we Castalians be excluded from
them?"

The Magister Musicae drew the young man aside and stood with him under one
of the giant trees. An almost sly smile puckered the skin around his eyes into
little wrinkles as he replied: "Your name is Knecht, my friend, and perhaps for
that reason the word 'free' is so alluring for you. But do not take it too seri-
ously in this case. When the non-Castalians speak of the free professions, the
word may sound very serious and even inspiring. But when we use it, we intend it
ironically. Freedom exists in those professions only to the extent that the stu-
dent chooses the profession himself. That produces an appearance of freedom,
although in most cases the choice is made less by the student than by his family,
and many a father would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free
choice. But perhaps that is a slander; let us drop this objection. Let us say that
the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the
profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the
university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid
curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he
receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom.
But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on
success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not
people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in
the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In
return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated
by the unsuccessful, or vice versa. For the elite pupil and later member of the
Order, everything is the other way around. He does not 'choose' any profession.
He does not imagine that he is a better judge of his own talents than are his
teachers. He accepts the place and the function within the hierarchy that his
superiors choose for him--if, that is, the matter is not reversed and the qual-
ities, gifts, and faults of the pupil compel the teachers to send him to one
place or another. In the midst of this seeming unfreedom every electus enjoys
the greatest imaginable freedom after his early courses. Whereas the man in the
'free' professions must submit to a narrow and rigid course of studies with
rigid examinations in order to train for his future career, the electus, as soon
as he begins studying independently, enjoys so much freedom that there are many
who all their lives choose the most abstruse and frequently almost foolish stud-
ies, and may continue without hindrance as long as their conduct does not degen-
erate. The natural teacher is employed as teacher, the natural educator as edu-
cator, the natural translator as translator; each, as if of his own accord, finds
his way to the place in which he can serve, and in serving be free. Moreover, for
the rest of his life he is saved from that 'freedom' of career which means such
terrible slavery. He knows nothing of the struggle for money, fame, rank; he rec-
ognizes no parties, no dichotomy between the individual and the office, between
what is private and what is public; he feels no dependence upon success. Now do
you see, my son, that when we speak of the free professions, the word 'free' is
meant rather humorously."


Knecht's departure from Eschholz marked the end of an era in his life. If hith-
erto he had lived a happy childhood, in a willing subordination and harmony
almost without problems, there now began a period of struggle, development, and
complex difficulties. He was about seventeen years old when he was informed of
his impending transfer. A number of his classmates received the same announce-
ment, and for a short while there was no more important question among the elect,
and none more discussed, than the place to which each of them would be trans-
planted. In keeping with tradition, they were told only a few days before their
departure, and between the graduation ceremony and departure there were several
days of vacation.

During this vacation something splendid happened to Knecht. The Music Master
proposed he take a walking trip and visit him, spending a few days as his guest.
That was a great and rare honor. Early one morning Knecht set out with a fellow
graduate--for he was still considered an Eschholz pupil, and at this level boys
were not allowed to travel alone. They tramped toward the forest and the
mountains, and when after three hours of steady climbing through shady woods
they reached a treeless summit, they saw far below them, already small and easy
to grasp as a whole, their Eschholz, recognizable even at this distance by the
dark mass of the five giant trees, the quadrangle with its segments of lawn and
sparkling pools, the tall schoolhouse, the service buildings, the village, the
famous grove of ash trees from which the school took its name. The two youths
stood still, looking down. A good many of us cherish the memory of this lovely
view; it was then not very different from the way it looks today, for the buildings
were rebuilt after the great fire, and three of the five tall trees survived the
blaze. They saw their school lying below them, their home for many years, to which
they would soon be bidding good-by, and both of them felt their hearts contract
at the sight.

"I think I've never before really seen how beautiful it is," Joseph's companion
said. "But I suppose it's because I'm seeing it for the first time as something I
must leave and say farewell to."

"That's exactly it," Knecht said. "You're right, I feel the same way. But even
though we are going away, we won't after all be leaving Eschholz. Only the ones
who have gone away forever have really left it, like Otto, for instance, who
could make up such funny bits of Latin doggerel, or Charlemagne, who could
swim so long under water, and the others. They really said farewell and broke
away. It's a long time since I've thought about them, but now they come back
to me. Laugh at me if you like, but in spite of everything there's something
impressive to me about those apostates, just as there is a grandeur about the
fallen angel Lucifer. Perhaps they did the wrong thing, or rather, undoubtedly
they did the wrong thing, but all the same they did something, accomplished
something; they ventured a leap, and that took courage. We others have been
hardworking and patient and reasonable, but we haven't done anything, we
haven't taken any leaps."

"I don't know," his companion said. "Many of them neither did anything nor
ventured anything; they simply fooled around until they were dismissed. But
maybe I don't quite understand you. What do you mean about leaping?"

"I mean being able to take a plunge, to take things seriously, to--well, that's
just it, to leap. I wouldn't want to leap back to my former home and my former
life; it doesn't attract me and I've almost forgotten it. But I do wish that if
ever the time comes and it proves to be necessary, that I too will be able to
free myself and leap, only not backward into something inferior, but forward
and into something higher."

"Well, that is what we are headed for. Eschholz was one step; the next will be
higher, and finally the Order awaits us."

"Yes, but that isn't what I meant. Let's move on, amice; walking is so great,
it will cheer me up again. We've really given ourselves a case of the dumps."

This mood and those words, which his classmate recorded, already sound the
note which prevailed during the stormy period of Knecht's adolescence.

The hikers tramped for two days before they reached the Music Master's current
home, Monteport, high in the mountains, where the Master lived in the former
monastery, giving a course for conductors. Knecht's classmate was lodged in the
guest house, while Knecht himself was assigned a small cell in the Magister's
apartment. He had barely unpacked his knapsack and washed when his host
came in. The venerable man shook hands with the boy, sat down with a small
sigh, and for a few minutes closed his eyes, as was his habit when he was very
tired. Then, looking up with a friendly smile, he said: "Forgive me; I am not a
very good host. You have just come from a long hike and must be tired, and to
tell the truth so am I--my day is somewhat overcrowded--but if you are not yet
ready for bed, I should like to have an hour with you in my study. You will be
staying here two days, and tomorrow both you and your classmate will be dining
with me, but unfortunately my time is so limited, and we must somehow manage
to save the few hours I need for you. So shall we begin right away?"

He led Knecht into a large vaulted cell empty of furniture but for an old piano
and two chairs. They sat down in the chairs.

"You will soon be entering another stage," the Master said. "There you will learn
all sorts of new things, some of them very pleasant. Probably you'll also begin
dabbling in the Glass Bead Game before long. All that is very fine and important,
but one thing is more important than anything else: you are going to learn med-
itation there. Supposedly all the students learn it, but one can't go checking
up on them. I want you to learn it properly and well, just as well as music; then
everything else will follow of its own accord. Therefore I'd like to give you the
first two or three lessons myself; that was the purpose of my invitation. So today
and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow let us try to meditate for an hour each
day, and moreover on music. You will be given a glass of milk now, so that hunger
and thirst do not disturb you; supper will be brought to us later."

He rapped on the door, and a glass of milk was brought in.

"Drink slowly, slowly," he admonished. "Take your time, and do not speak."

Knecht drank his cool milk very slowly. Opposite him, the dear man sat with his
eyes closed again. His face looked very old, but friendly; it was full of peace,
and he was smiling to himself, as though he had stepped down into his own
thoughts like a tired man into a footbath. Tranquility streamed from him; Knecht
felt it, and himself grew calmer.

Now the Magister turned on his chair and placed his hands on the piano. He played
a theme, and carried it forward with variations; it seemed to be a piece by some
Italian master. He instructed his guest to imagine the progress of the music as
a dance, a continuous series of balancing exercises, a succession of smaller or
larger steps from the middle of an axis of symmetry, and to focus his mind entire-
ly on the figure which these steps formed. He played the bars once more, silently
reflected on them, played them again, then sat quite still, hands on his knees,
eyes half closed, without the slightest movement, repeating and contemplating the
music within himself. His pupil, too, listened within himself, saw fragments of
lines of notes before him, saw something moving, something stepping, dancing, and
hovering, and tried to perceive and read the movement as if it were the curves in
the line of a bird's flight. The pattern grew confused and he lost it; he had to
begin over again; for a moment his concentration left him and he was in a void.
He looked around and saw the Master's still, abstracted face floating palely in the
twilight, found his way back again to that mental space he had drifted out of. He
heard the music sounding in it again, saw it striding along, saw it inscribing the
line of its movement, and followed in his mind the dancing feet of the invisible
dancers. . .

It seemed to him that a long time had passed before he glided out of that space
once more, again became aware of the chair he sat on, the mat-covered stone
floor, the dimmer dusk outside the windows. He felt someone regarding him,
looked up and into the eyes of the Music Master, who was attentively studying
him. The Master gave him an almost imperceptible nod, with one finger played
pianissimo the last variation of the Italian piece, and stood up.

"Stay on," he said. "I shall be back. Try once again to track down the music; pay
attention to the figure. But don't force yourself; it's only a game. If you should
fall asleep over it, there's no harm."

He left; there was still a task awaiting him, left over from the overcrowded day.
It was no easy and pleasant task, none that he would have wished for. One of the
students in the conducting course was a gifted but vain and overbearing person.
The Music Master would have to speak to him now, curbing his bad habits,
showing him his faults, all this with an even balance of solicitude and
superiority, love and authority. He sighed. What a pity that no arrangements
were ever final, that recognized errors were never eliminated for good, that again
and again the selfsame failings had to be combated, the selfsame weeds plucked
out. Talent without character, virtuosity without values, had dominated musical
life in the Age of the Feuilleton, had been extirpated during the musical
Renaissance--and here was that same spirit again, making vigorous growth.

When he returned from his errand to have supper with Joseph, he found the boy
sitting still, but contented and no longer tired in the least. "It was beautiful,"
Joseph said dreamily. "While it was going on, the music vanished completely; it
changed."

"Let it reverberate inside you," the Master said, leading him into a small
chamber where a table was set with bread and fruit. They ate, and the Master
invited him to sit in on the conducting course for a while in the morning. Just
before showing his guest to his cell and retiring for the night, he said: "During
your meditation you saw something; the music appeared to you as a figure. If
you feel so minded, try to copy it down."

In the guest cell Knecht found pencils and paper on the table, and before he went
to bed he tried to draw the figure which the music had assumed for him. He drew
a line, and moving diagonally off from the line at rhythmic intervals short
tributary lines. It looked something like the arrangement of leaves on the twig of
a tree. What he had produced did not satisfy him, but he felt impelled to try it
again and yet again. At last he playfully curved the line into a circle from which
the tributary lines radiated, like flowers in a garland. Then he went to bed and
fell asleep quickly. He dreamed that he was once again on that height above the
woods, where he had rested with his classmate, and saw dear Eschholz spread out
below him. And as he looked down, the quadrangle of the school building contracted
into an oval and then spread out to a circle, a garland, and the garland began
turning slowly; it turned with increasing speed, until at last it was whirling
madly and burst, flying apart into twinkling stars.

He had forgotten this dream by the time he awoke. But later, during a morning
walk, the Master asked him whether he had dreamt, and it seemed to him that he
must have had an unpleasant experience in his dreams. He thought, recovered
the dream, told it, and was astonished at how innocuous it sounded. The Master
listened closely.

"Should we be mindful of dreams?" Joseph asked. "Can we interpret them?"

The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: "We should be mindful of
everything, for we can interpret everything."

After they had walked on a bit, he asked paternally: "Which school would you
most like to enter?"

Joseph flushed. He murmured quickly: "Waldzell, I think!"

The Master nodded. "I thought so. Of course you know the old saying: "Gignit
autem artificiosam '. . ."

Still blushing, Joseph completed the saying familiar to every student: "Gignit
autem artificiosam lusorum gentem Cella Silvestris ": "But Waldzell breeds the
skillful Glass Bead Game players."

The old man gave him a warm look. "Probably that is your path, Joseph. As you
well know, there are some who do not think well of the Glass Bead Game. They
say it is a substitute for the arts, and that the players are mere popularizers;
that they can no longer be regarded as truly devoted to the things of the mind,
but are merely artistic dilettantes given to improvisation and feckless fancy.
You will see how much or how little truth there is in that. Perhaps you your-
self have notions about the Glass Bead Game, expecting more of it than it will
give you, or perhaps the reverse. There is no doubt that the Game has its dan-
gers. For that very reason we love it; only the weak are sent out on paths with-
out perils. But never forget what I have told you so often: our mission is to
recognize contraries for what they are: first of all as contraries, but then
as opposite poles of a unity. Such is the nature of the Glass Bead Game. The
artistically inclined delight in the Game because it provides opportunities
for improvisation and fantasy. The strict scholars and scientists despise it--and
so do some musicians also--because, they say, it lacks that degree of strictness
which their specialties can achieve. Well and good, you will encounter these
antinomies, and in time you will discover that they are subjective, not objective -
- that, for example, a fancy-free artist avoids pure mathematics or logic not
because he understands them and could say something about them if he wished,
but because he instinctively inclines toward other things. Such instinctive and
violent inclinations and disinclinations are signs by which you can recognize
the pettier souls. In great souls and superior minds, these passions are not
found. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way sta-
tion. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving
to reach the center, not the periphery. Remember this: one can be a strict log-
ician or grammarian, and at the same time full of imagination and music. One
can be a musician or Glass Bead Game player and at the same time wholly devoted
to rule and order. The kind of person we want to develop, the kind of person we
aim to become, would at any time be able to exchange his discipline or art for
any other. He would infuse the Glass Bead Game with crystalline logic, and gram-
mar with creative imagination. That is how we ought to be. We should be so con-
stituted that we can at any time be placed in a different position without of-
fering resistance or losing our heads."

"I think I understand," Joseph said. "But are not those who have such strong
preferences and aversions simply more passionate natures, others just more
sober and temperate?"

"That seems to be true and yet it is not," the Master replied, laughing. "To be
capable of everything and do justice to everything, one certainly does not need
less spiritual force and élan and warmth, but more. What you call passion is not
spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where
passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and
ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and
false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those
who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true
being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the
flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will
not shout and wave their arms. But I assure you, they are nevertheless burning
with subdued fires."

"Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only
there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything
tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one
way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history
can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing
but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and
valid doctrine?"

The Master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for
a little, then said: "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute,
perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long
for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection
of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived,
not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht--I can see they have al-
ready begun."

During those few days Joseph for the first time saw his beloved Magister in his
everyday life and work, and he felt intense admiration, although only a small
part of what the Music Master accomplished every day came into view. But most
of all the Master won his heart by taking such an interest in him, by having
invited him, and by managing to spare hours for him despite his being often so
overworked and overtired. Nor was it only the lessons. If this introduction to
meditation made so deep and lasting an impression upon him, it did so, as he
later learned to appreciate, not because the Master's technique was so especially
subtle and unique, but only because of the Master's personality and example. His
later teachers, who instructed him in meditation during the following year, gave
him more guidance, more precise lessons; they controlled results more closely,
asked more questions, managed to do more correcting. The Music Master,
confident of his power over this young man, did very little teaching and talking.
Mostly, he merely set themes and showed the way by example. Knecht observed
the way the Master often looked so old and worn out, but after sinking into
himself with half-closed eyes he would once again manage to look so tranquil,
vigorous, cheerful, and friendly. To Joseph this renewal was a persuasive
demonstration of the right way to the true springs, the way from restiveness to
peace. Whatever the Master had to say about this matter was casually imparted
to Knecht on brief walks or at meals.

We know also that at this time the Magister gave Knecht some first hints and
suggestions about the Glass Bead Game, but none of his actual words have been
preserved. Joseph was also struck by the fact that the Master took some trouble
with Joseph's companion, so that the boy would not feel he was only a hanger-on.
The old man seemed to think of everything.

The brief stay in Monteport, the three lessons in meditation, attendance at the
course for conductors, the few talks with the Master, meant a great deal to
Joseph Knecht. There was no question but that the Master had found the most
effective time for interposing briefly in Knecht's life. The chief purpose of his
invitation, as he had said, had been to commend meditation to Joseph; but this
invitation had been no less important in itself, as a distinction and a token that
he was well thought of, that his superiors expected something of him. It was the
second stage of vocation. He had been granted some insight into the inner
spheres. If one of the twelve Masters summoned a pupil at his level to come so
close, that was not just an act of personal benevolence. What a Master did was
always more than personal.

Before they left, each of the boys received a small gift: the scores of two Bach
choral preludes for Joseph, a handsome pocket edition of Horace for his friend.
The Master, as he was bidding good-by to Joseph, said to him: "In a few days
you will learn which school you have been assigned to. I come to the higher
schools less frequently than to Eschholz, but I am sure we shall see each other
there too, if I keep in good health. If you care to, you might write me a letter
once a year, especially about the course of your musical studies. Criticism of
your teachers is not prohibited, but I am not so concerned about that. A great
many things await you; I hope you will meet the challenges. Our Castalia is not
supposed to be merely an elite; it ought above all to be a hierarchy, a structure in
which every brick derives its meaning only from its place in the whole. There is
no path leading out of this whole, and one who climbs higher and is assigned to
greater and greater tasks does not acquire more freedom, only more and more
responsibilities. Till we meet again, young friend. It was a pleasure to me to
have you here."

The two boys tramped back, and both were gayer and more talkative than they
had been on the way to Monteport. The few days in different air and amid
different sights, the contact with a different sphere of life, had relaxed them,
made them freer from Eschholz and the mood of parting there. It had also made
them doubly eager for change and the future. At many a resting place in the
forest, or above one of the precipitous gorges in the vicinity of Monteport, they
took their wooden flutes from their pockets and played duets, mostly folksongs.
By the time they had once again reached that peak above Eschholz, with its
prospect of the institution and its trees, the conversation they had had there
seemed to both of them far away in the past. All things had taken on a new as-
pect. They did not say a word about it; they felt a little ashamed of what they
had felt and said so short a while ago, which already had become outmoded and
insubstantial.

In Eschholz they had to wait only until the following day to learn their
destinations. Knecht had been assigned to Waldzell.



　　　　　　　　　　　　　　TWO

　　　　　　　　　　　　WALDZEL



"BUT WALDZELL BREEDS the skillful Glass Bead Game players," runs the
old saying about this famous school. Among the Castalian schools of the second
and third levels, it was the one most devoted to the arts. That is to say, whereas
at other schools a particular branch of scholarship was distinctly dominant, such
as classical philology in Keuperheim, Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy in
Porta, mathematics in Planvaste, Waldzell traditionally cultivated a tendency
toward universality and toward an alliance between scholarship and the arts. The
highest symbol of these tendencies was the Glass Bead Game. Even here, as at
all the other schools, the Game was by no means taught officially and as a
compulsory subject. But Waldzell students devoted their private studies almost
exclusively to it. Then again, the town of Waldzell was after all the seat of the
official Glass Bead Game and its institutions. The famous Game Hall for the
ceremonial games was located here, as was the enormous Game Archives, with
its officialdom and its libraries. Here, too, was the residence of the Ludi
Magister. And although these institutions existed altogether independently and
the school was in no way attached to them, the spirit of the institutions
permeated the school. Something of the hallowed atmosphere of the great public
Games spread over the whole area. The town itself was very proud of being the
home not only of a school, but of the Game also. The townspeople called the
students "scholars" and referred to those who attended the Game School as
"lusers"--a corruption of lusores.

The Waldzell school was, incidentally, the smallest of the Castalian schools. The
number of students rarely exceeded sixty, and undoubtedly this circumstance
also helped to lend it an air of uniqueness and aristocracy, of special distinction,
for here was the very elite of the elite. Moreover, during the past several decades
this venerable school had produced many Masters and the majority of Glass
Bead Game players. Not that Waldzell's brilliant reputation was entirely
uncontested. Some thought that the Waldzellers were priggish aesthetes and
pampered princes, useless for anything but the Glass Bead Game. At times there
would be a vogue among the schools for making sardonic comments on the
Waldzell students; but the very harshness of the jokes and criticisms proves that
jealousy and envy underlay them. All in all, the transfer to Waldzell in itself
implied a certain distinction. Joseph Knecht, too, realized that, and although he
was not ambitious in the vulgar sense of the word, he accepted the distinction
with a measure of joyous pride.

Along with several schoolmates, he arrived in Waldzell on foot. Full of high
expectations and ready for whatever might come, he walked through the
southern gate and was instantly enchanted by the dark-brown aspect of the town
and the great bulk of the former Cistercian monastery in which the school had
been established. Even before he had been given his new uniform, immediately
after the reception snack in the porter's lodge, he set out alone to explore his new
home. He found the footpath that ran along the remains of the ancient town wall
above the river, stood on the arched bridge and listened to the roaring of the
millrace, walked past the graveyard and down the lane of linden trees. He saw
and recognized, beyond the tall hedges, the Vicus Lusorum, the adjacent little
settlement of the Glass Bead Game players. Here were the Festival Hall, the
Archives, the classrooms, the houses for guests and teachers. He saw coming
from one of these houses a man in the dress of the Glass Bead Game players,
and decided that this must be one of the fabulous lusores, possibly the Magister
Ludi in person. The spell of this atmosphere exerted a tremendous force upon
him. Everything here seemed old, venerable, sanctified, rich with tradition; here
one was quite a bit closer to the Center than in Eschholz. And as he returned
from the Glass Bead Game district, he began to feel other spells, possibly less
venerable, but no less exciting. They came from the town itself, this sample of
the profane world with its business and commerce, its dogs and children, its
smells of stores and handicrafts, its bearded citizens and fat wives behind the
shop doors, the children playing and clamoring, the girls throwing mocking
looks. Many things reminded him of remote worlds he had once known, of
Berolfingen. He had thought all that entirely forgotten. Now deep layers in his
soul responded to all this, to the scenes, the sounds, the smells. A world less
tranquil than that of Eschholz, but richer and more colorful, seemed to be
awaiting him here.

As a matter of fact, the school at first turned out to be the exact continuation of
his previous school, although with the addition of several new subjects. Nothing
was really new there except the meditation exercises; and after all the Music
Master had already given him a foretaste of these. He accepted meditation
willingly enough, but without regarding it as more than a pleasant, relaxing
game. Only somewhat later--as we shall see in due time--would he have a
living experience of its true value.

The headmaster of Waldzell, Otto Zbinden, was an unusual, somewhat eccentric
man who inspired a certain amount of fear. He was nearing sixty at the time
Knecht entered. A good many of the entries we have examined concerning
Joseph Knecht are set down in his handsome and impetuous handwriting. But at
the beginning the young man's curiosity was captured far less by the teachers
than by his fellow students. With two of these in particular Knecht struck up a
lively relationship, for which there is ample documentation. The first of these
was Carlo Ferromonte, a boy his own age to whom he became attached during
his very first months at Waldzell. (Ferromonte later rose to the second-highest
rank on the Board, as deputy to the Music Master; we are indebted to him for,
among other things, a History of Styles in Sixteenth-Century Lute Music.) The
other boys called him "Rice Eater" and prized him for his aptitude at sports. His
friendship with Joseph began with talks about music and led to joint studying
and practicing which continued for several years; we are informed about this
partly by Knecht's rare but copious letters to the Music Master. In the first of
these letters Knecht calls Ferromonte a "specialist and connoisseur in music rich
in ornamentation, embellishments, trills, etc." The boys played Couperin,
Purcell, and other masters of the period around 1700. In one of the letters Knecht
gives a detailed account of these practice sessions and this music "in which
many of the pieces have some embellishment over almost every note." He
continues: "After one has played nothing but turns, shakes, and mordents for a
few hours, one's fingers feel as if they are charged with electricity."

In fact he made great progress in music. By his second or third year at Waldzell
he was reading and playing the notations, clefs, abbreviations, and figured basses
of all centuries and styles with tolerable fluency. He had made himself at home
in the realm of Western music, as much of it as has been preserved for us, in that
special way that proceeds from practical craftsmanship and is not above taking
utmost heed of a piece of music's sensuous and technical aspects as a means for
penetrating the spirit. His intense concern with the sensuous quality of music, his
efforts to understand the spirit of various musical styles from the physical nature
of the sounds, the sensations in the ear, deterred him for a remarkably long time
from devoting himself to the elementary course in the Glass Bead Game. In one
of his lectures in subsequent years he remarked: "One who knows music only
from the extracts which the Glass Bead Game distills from it may well be a good
Glass Bead Game player, but he is far from being a musician, and presumably he
is no historian either. Music does not consist only in those purely intellectual
oscillations and figurations which we have abstracted from it. All through the
ages its pleasure has primarily consisted in its sensuous character, in the
outpouring of breath, in the beating of time, in the colorations, frictions, and
stimuli which arise from the blending of voices in the concord of instruments.
Certainly the spirit is the main thing, and certainly the invention of new
instruments and the alteration of old ones, the introduction of new keys and new
rules or new taboos regarding construction and harmony are always mere
gestures and superficialities, even as the costumes and fashions of nations are
superficialities. But one must have apprehended and tasted these superficial and
sensuous distinctions with the senses to be able to interpret from them the nature
of eras and styles. We make music with our hands and fingers, with our mouths
and lungs, not with our brains alone, and someone who can read notes but has no
command of any instrument should not join in the dialogue of music. Thus, too,
the history of music is hardly to be understood solely in terms of an abstract
history of styles. For example, the periods of decadence in music would remain
totally incomprehensible if we failed to recognize in each one of them the
preponderance of the sensuous and quantitative elements over the 'spiritual
element.' "

For a time it appeared as if Knecht had decided to become nothing but a mus-
ician. In favor of music he neglected all the optional subjects, including the
introductory course in the Glass Bead Game, to such an extent that toward the
end of the first semester the headmaster called him to an accounting. Knecht
refused to be intimidated; he stubbornly insisted on his rights. It is said that
he told the headmaster: "If I fail in any official subject, you could rightly
reprimand me. On the other hand I have the right to devote three quarters or
even four quarters of my free time to music. I stand on the statutes of the
school." Headmaster Zbinden was sensible enough not to insist, but he naturally
remembered this student and is said to have treated him with cold severity for a
long time.

This peculiar period in Knecht's student days lasted for more than a year,
probably for about a year and a half. He received normal but not brilliant marks
and--to judge by the incident with the headmaster--his behavior was marked
by a rather defiant withdrawal, no noteworthy friendships, but in compensation
this extraordinary passion for music-making. He abstained from almost all
private studies, including the Glass Bead Game. Several of these traits are
undoubtedly signs of puberty; during this period he probably encountered the
other sex only by chance, and mistrustfully; presumably he was quite shy--like
so many Eschholz pupils if they do not happen to have sisters at home. He read
a great deal, especially the German philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, and the
Romantics, among whom Hegel exerted by far the strongest attraction upon him.

We must now give some account of that other fellow student who played a
significant part in Knecht's life at Waldzell: the hospitant Plinio Designori.
Hospitants were boys who went through the elite schools as guests, that is,
without the intention of remaining permanently in the Pedagogic Province and
entering the Order. Such hospitants turned up every so often, although they
were quite rare, for the Board of Educators was naturally averse to the idea of
educating students who intended to return home and into the world after they
finished their studies at the elite schools. However, the country had several old
patrician families who had performed notable services for Castalia at the time of
its foundation and in which the custom still prevailed (it has not entirely died out
to this day) of having one of the sons educated as a guest in the elite schools. It
had become an established prerogative for those few families, although of course
the boys in question had to be gifted enough to meet the standards of the schools.

These hospitants, although in every respect subject to the same rules as all elite
students, formed an exceptional group within the student body if only because
they did not grow increasingly estranged from their native soil and their families
with each passing year. On the contrary, they spent all the holidays at home and
always remained guests and strangers among their fellow students, since they
preserved the habits and ways of thinking of their place of origin. Home, a
worldly career, a profession and marriage awaited them. Only on very rare
occasions did it happen that such a guest student, captivated by the spirit of the
Province, would obtain the consent of his family and after all remain in Castalia
and enter the Order. On the other hand, in the history of our country there have
been several statesmen who were guest students in their youth, and now and
then, when public opinion for one reason or another had turned against the elite
schools and the Order, these statesmen came stoutly to the defense of both.

Plinio Designori, then, was one such hospitant whom Joseph Knecht--slightly
his junior--encountered in Waldzell. He was a talented young man, particularly
brilliant in talk and debate, fiery and somewhat restive in temperament. His
presence often troubled Headmaster Zbinden, for although he was a good student
and gave no cause for reprimands, he made no effort to forget his exceptional
position as a hospitant and to fall into line as inconspicuously as possible. On the
contrary, he frankly and belligerently professed a non-Castalian, worldly point of
view.

Inevitably, a special relationship sprang up between these two students. Both
were extremely gifted and both had a vocation; these qualities made them
brothers, although in everything else they were opposites. It would have required
a teacher of unusual insight and skill to extract the quintessence from the
problem that thus arose and to employ the rules of dialectics to derive synthesis
from the antitheses. Headmaster Zbinden did not lack the talent or will; he was
not one of those teachers who find geniuses an embarrassment. But for this
particular case he lacked the important prerequisite: the trust of both students.
Plinio, who enjoyed the role of outsider and revolutionary, remained
permanently on his guard in his dealings with the headmaster; and unfortunately
the headmaster had clashed with Joseph Knecht over that question of his private
studies, so that Knecht, too, would not have turned to Zbinden for advice.

Fortunately, there was the Music Master. Knecht did turn to him with a request
for help and advice, and the wise old musician took the matter seriously and
directed the course of the game with masterly skill, as we shall see. In the hands
of this Master the greatest danger and temptation in young Knecht's life was
converted into an honorable task, and the young man proved able to cope with it.
The psychological history of the friendship-and-enmity between Joseph and
Plinio--a sonata movement on two themes, or a dialectical interplay between
two minds--went somewhat as follows.

At first, of course, it was Designori who attracted his opponent. He was the
elder; he was a handsome, fiery, and well-spoken young man; and above all he
was one of those "from outside," a non-Castalian, a boy from the world, a person
with father and mother, uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters, one for whom
Castalia with all its rules, traditions, and ideals represented only a stage along
the road, a limited sojourn. For this rara avis Castalia was not the world; for him
Waldzell was a school like any other; for him the "return to the world" was no
disgrace and punishment; the future awaiting him was not the Order but career,
marriage, politics, in short that "real life" which every Castalian secretly longed
to know more about. For the "world" was the same thing for a Castalian that it
had long ago been for the penitents and monks: something inferior and for-
bidden, no doubt, but nonetheless mysterious, tempting, fascinating. And Plinio
truly made no secret of his attachment to the world; he was not in the least
ashamed of it. On the contrary, he was proud of it. With a zeal still half boyish
and histrionic, but also half consciously propagandistic, he stressed his own
differentness. He seized every pretext for setting his secular views and standards
against those of Castalia, and contending that his own were better, juster, more
natural, more human. In these arguments he bandied about words like "nature"
and "common sense," to the discredit of the overrefined, unworldly spirit of the
school. He made use of slogans and hyperbole, but had the good taste and tact
not to descend to crude provocations, but more or less to give the methods of
disputation customary in Waldzell their due. He wanted to defend the "world"
and the unreflective life against the "arrogant scholastic intellectuality" of
Castalia, but he also wanted to prove that he could do so with his opponents'
weapons. He did not want to be thought the dull-witted brute blindly trampling
around in the flower garden of culture.

Now and again Joseph Knecht had stood, a silent but attentive listener, on the
edges of small groups of students whose center was Designori. Plinio usually did
most of the talking. With curiosity, astonishment, and alarm Joseph had heard
Plinio excoriating all authority, everything that was held sacred in Castalia.
He heard everything questioned, everything he believed in exposed as dubious or
ridiculous. Joseph soon noted that many in the audience did not take these
speeches seriously; some, it was clear, listened only for the fun of it, as
people listen to a barker at a fair. Frequently, too, he heard some of the boys
answer Plinio's charges sarcastically or seriously. Still there were always
several schoolmates gathered around this boy Plinio; he was always the center
of attention, and whether or not there happened to be an opponent in the group,
he always exerted an attraction so strong that it was akin to seduction.

Joseph himself was as much stirred as those others who gathered around the live-
ly orator and listened to his tirades with astonishment or laughter. In spite of
the trepidation and even fear that he felt during such speeches, Joseph was aware
of their sinister attraction for him. He was drawn to them not just because they
were amusing. On the contrary, they seemed to concern him directly and serious-
ly. Not that he would inwardly have agreed with the audacious orator, but there
were doubts whose very existence or possibility you had only to know about and
you instantly began to suffer them. At the beginning it was not any serious suf-
fering; it was merely a matter of being slightly disturbed, uneasy--a feeling
compounded of powerful urge and guilty conscience.

The time had to come, and it came, when Designori noticed that among his
listeners was one to whom his words meant more than rousing entertainment and
the fun of argument: a fair-haired boy who looked handsome and finely wrought,
but rather shy, and who blushed and gave terse, embarrassed replies when Plinio
said a friendly word to him. Evidently this boy had been trailing after him for
some time, Plinio thought, and decided to reward him with a friendly gesture and
win him over completely by inviting him to his room that afternoon. To Plinio's
surprise the boy held off, would not linger to talk with him, and declined the
invitation. Provoked, the older boy began courting the reticent Joseph. Possibly
he did so at first only out of vanity, but later he went about it in all serious-
ness, for he sensed an antagonist who would be perhaps a future friend, perhaps
the opposite. Again and again he saw Joseph hanging around near him, and noted
the intensity with which Joseph listened, but the shy boy would always retreat
as soon as he tried to approach him.

There were reasons behind this conduct. Joseph had long since come to feel that
this other boy would mean something important to him, perhaps something fine,
an enlargement of his horizon, insight or illumination, perhaps also temptation
and danger. Whatever it was, this was a test he had to pass. He had told his
friend Ferromonte about the first stirrings of skepticism and restlessness that
Plinio's talks had aroused in him, but his friend had paid little attention; he
dismissed Plinio as a conceited and self-important fellow not worth listening to,
and promptly buried himself in his music again. Instinct warned Joseph that the
headmaster was the proper authority to whom to bring his doubts and queries;
but since that little clash he no longer had a cordial and candid relationship with
Zbinden. He was afraid the headmaster might regard his coming to him with this
question as a kind of talebearing.

In this dilemma, which grew increasingly painful because of Plinio's efforts to
strike up a friendship, he turned to his patron and guardian angel, the Music
Master, and wrote him a very long letter which has been preserved. In part, it
read:

"I am not yet certain whether Plinio hopes to win me over to his way of thinking,
or whether he merely wants someone to discuss these matters with. I hope it is
the latter, for to convert me to his views would mean leading me into disloyalty
and destroying my life, which after all is rooted in Castalia. I have no parents
and friends on the outside to whom I could return if I should ever really desire
to. But even if Plinio's sacrilegious speeches are not aimed at conversion and
influencing, they leave me at a loss. For to be perfectly frank with you, dear
Master, there is something in Plinio's point of view that I cannot gainsay; he
appeals to a voice within me which sometimes strongly seconds what he says.
Presumably it is the voice of nature, and it runs utterly counter to my education
and the outlook customary among us. When Plinio calls our teachers and Masters
a priestly caste and us a pack of spoon-fed eunuchs, he is of course using
coarse and exaggerated language, but there may well be some truth to what he
says, for otherwise I would hardly be so upset by it. Plinio can say the most
startling and discouraging things. For example, he contends that the Glass Bead
Game is a retrogression to the Age of the Feuilleton, sheer irresponsible play-
ing around with an alphabet into which we have broken down the languages of the
different arts and sciences. It's nothing but associations and toying with an-
alogies, he says. Or again he declares that our resigned sterility proves the
worthlessness of our whole culture and our intellectual attitudes. We analyze
the laws and techniques of all the styles and periods of music, he points out,
but produce no new music ourselves. We read and exposit Pindar or Goethe and
are ashamed to create verse ourselves. Those are accusations I cannot laugh
at. And they are not the worst; they are not the ones that wound me most. It
is bad enough when he says, for example, that we Castalians lead the life of
artifically reared songbirds, do not earn our bread ourselves, never face
necessity and the struggle for existence, neither know or wish to know any-
thing about that portion of humanity whose labor and poverty provide the base
for our lives of luxury."

The letter concluded: "Perhaps I have abused your friendliness and kindness,
Reverendissime, and I am prepared to be reproved. Scold me, impose penances
on me--I shall be grateful for them. But I am in dire need of advice. I can
sustain the present situation for a little while longer. But I cannot shape
it into any real and fruitful development, for I am too weak and inexperienced.
Moreover, and perhaps this is the worst of all, I cannot confide in our
headmaster unless you explicitly command me to do so. That is why I have
troubled you with this affair, which is becoming a source of great distress to
me."

It would be of the greatest value to us if we also possessed the Master's reply
to this cry for help in black and white. But the reply was given orally. Shortly
after Knecht wrote, the Magister Musicae himself arrived in Waldzell to direct
an examination in music, and during the days he spent there he devoted consid-
erable time to his young friend. We know of this from Knecht's later recollec-
tions. The Music Master did not make things easy for him. He began by looking
closely into Knecht's grades and into the matter of his private studies as well.
The latter, he decided, were much too one-sided; in this regard the headmaster
had been right, and he insisted that Knecht admit as much to the headmaster. He
gave precise directives for Knecht's conduct toward Designori, and did not leave
until this question, too, had been discussed with Headmaster Zbinden. The
outcome was twofold: that remarkable joust between Designori and Knecht,
which none who looked on would ever forget; and an entirely new relationship
between Knecht and the headmaster. Not that this relationship ever partook of
the affection and mystery that linked Knecht to the Music Master, but at least
it was lucid and relaxed.

The course that had been traced for Knecht determined the shape of his life for
some time. He had been given leave to accept Designori's friendship, to expose
himself to his influence and his attacks without intervention or supervision by
his teachers. But his mentor specifically charged him to defend Castalia against
the critic, and to raise the clash of views to the highest level. That meant, among
other things, that Joseph had to make an intensive study of the fundamentals of
the prevailing system in Castalia and in the Order, and to recall them to mind
again and again. The debates between the two friendly opponents soon became
famous, and drew large audiences. Designori's aggressive and ironic tone
became subtler, his formulations stricter and more responsible, his criticism
more objective. Hitherto Plinio had been the winner in this contest; coming from
the "world," he possessed its experience, its methods, its means of attack, and
some of its ruthlessness as well. From conversations with adults at home he
knew all the indictments the world could muster against Castalia. But now
Knecht's replies forced him to realize that although he knew the world quite
well, better than any Castalian, he did not by any means know Castalia and its
spirit as well as those who were at home here, for whom Castalia had become
both native soil and destiny. He was forced to realize, and ultimately to admit,
that he was a guest here, not a native; that the outside world had no exclusive
claim on self-evident principles and truths arrived at through centuries of
experience. Here too, in the Pedagogic Province, there was a tradition, what
might even be called a "nature," with which he was only imperfectly acquainted
and which was now being upheld by its spokesman, Joseph Knecht.

Knecht, for his part, in order to cope with his part as apologist, was obliged to
put a great deal of study, meditation, and self-discipline into clarifying and
deepening his understanding of what he was required to defend. In rhetoric
Designori remained his superior; his worldly training and cleverness supported
his natural fire and ambition. Even when he was being defeated on a point, he
managed to think of the audience and contrive a facesaving or witty line of
retreat. Knecht, on the other hand, when his opponent had driven him into a
corner, was apt to say: "I shall have to think about that for a while, Plinio.
Wait a few days; I'll come back to that point."

The relationship had thus been given a dignified form. In fact, for the
participants and the listeners the dispute had already become an indispensable
element in the school life of Waldzell. But the pressure and the conflict had
scarcely grown any easier for Knecht. Because of the high degree of confidence
and responsibility that had been placed upon him, he mastered his assignment,
and it is proof of the strength and soundness of his nature that he carried it out
without any visible damage. But privately, he suffered a great deal. If he felt
friendship for Plinio, he felt it not only for an engaging and clever, cosmopolitan
and articulate schoolmate, but also for that alien world which his friend and
opponent represented, with which he was becoming acquainted, however dimly,
in Plinio's personality, words, and gestures: that so-called "real" world in
which there were loving mothers and children, hungry people and poorhouses,
newspapers and election campaigns; that primitive and at the same time subtle
world to which Plinio returned at every vacation in order to visit his parents,
brothers, and sisters, to pay court to girls, to attend union meetings, or stay
as a guest at elegant clubs, while Joseph remained in Castalia, went tramping or
swimming, practiced Froberger's subtle and different fugues, or read Hegel.

Joseph had no doubt that he belonged in Castalia and was rightly leading a
Castalian life, a life without family, without a variety of legendary amusements,
a life without newspapers and also without poverty and hunger--though for all
that Plinio hammered away at the drones' existence of the elite students, he too
had so far never gone hungry or earned his own bread. No, Plinio's world was
not better and sounder. But it was there, it existed, and as Joseph knew from
history it had always been and had always been similar to what it now was.
Many nations had never known any other pattern, had no elite schools and
Pedagogic Province, no Order, Masters, and Glass Bead Game. The great maj-
ority of all human beings on the globe lived a life different from that of
Castalia, simpler, more primitive, more dangerous, more disorderly, less
sheltered. And this primitive world was innate in every man; everyone felt
something of it in his own heart, had some curiosity about it, some nostalgia
for it, some sympathy with it. The true task was to be fair to it, to keep a
place for it in one's own heart, but still not relapse into it. For alongside
it and superior to it was the second world, that of Castalia, the world of
Mind--artificial, more orderly, more secure, but still in need of constant
supervision and study. To serve the hierarchy, but without doing an injustice
to that other world, let alone despising it, and also without eying it with
vague desire or nostalgia--that must be the right course. For did not the
small world of Castalia serve the great world, provide it with teachers,
books, methods, act as guardian for the purity of its intellectual functions
and its morality? Castalia remained the training ground and refuge for that
small band of men whose lives were to be consecrated to Mind and to truth.
Then why were these two worlds apparently unable to live in fraternal har-
mony, parallel and intertwined; why could an individual not cherish and
unite both within himself?

One of the rare visits from the Music Master came upon a day when Joseph,
exhausted by his task, was having a hard time preserving his balance. The
Master diagnosed his state from a few of the boy's allusions; he read it even
more plainly in Joseph's strained appearance, his restive looks, his somewhat
nervous movements. He asked a few probing questions, was met by moroseness
and uncommunicativeness, and gave up that approach. Seriously concerned, he
took the boy to one of the practice rooms under the pretext of telling him about
a minor musicological discovery. He had Joseph bring in and tune a clavichord,
and involved him in a long tutoring session on the origin of sonata form until
the young man somewhat forgot his anxieties, yielded, and listened, relaxed and
grateful, to the Master's words and playing. Patiently, the Music Master took
what time was needed to put Joseph into a receptive state. And when he had
succeeded, when his lecture was over and he had concluded by playing one of
the Gabrieli sonatas, he stood up, began slowly pacing the little room, and
told a story.

"Many years ago I was once much preoccupied with this sonata. That was during
the period of my free studies, before I was called to teaching and later to the
post of Music Master. At the time I was ambitious to work out a history of the
sonata from a new point of view; but then for a while I stopped making any
progress at .all. I began more and more to doubt whether all these musical
and historical researches had any value whatsoever, whether they were really
any more than vacuous play for idle people, a scanty aesthetic substitute for
living a real life. In short, I had to pass through one of those crises in
which all studies, all intellectual efforts, everything that we mean by the
life of the mind, appear dubious and devalued and in which we tend to envy
every peasant at the plow and every pair of lovers and in which we tend to
envy every peasant at the plow and every pair of lovers at evening, or every
bird singing in a tree and every cicada chirping in the summer grass, because
they seem to us to be living such natural, fulfilled, and happy lives. We
know nothing of their troubles, of course, of the elements of harshness, dan-
ger, and suffering in their lot. In brief, I had pretty well lost my equilib-
rium. It was far from a pleasant state; in fact it was very hard to bear. I
thought up the wildest schemes for escaping and gaining my freedom. For exam-
ple, I imagined myself going out into the world as an itinerant musician and
playing dances for wedding parties. If some recruiting officer from afar had
appeared, as in old tales, and coaxed me to don a uniform and follow any
company of soldiers into any war, I would have gone along. And so things went
from bad to worse, as so often happens to people in such moods. I so thoroughly
lost my grip on myself that I could no longer deal with my trouble alone, and
had to seek help."

He paused for a moment and chuckled softly under his breath. Then he continued:
"Naturally I had a studies adviser, as the rules require, and of course it would
have been sensible and right as well as my duty to ask him for advice. But the
fact is, Joseph, that precisely when we run into difficulties and stray from our
path and are most in need of correction, precisely then we feel the greatest
disinclination to return to the normal way and seek out the normal form of
correction. My adviser had been dissatisfied with my last quarterly report; he
had offered serious objections to it; but I had thought myself on the way to new
discoveries and had rather resented his objections. In brief, I did not like the
idea of going to him; I did not want to eat humble pie and admit that he had been
right. Nor did I want to confide in my friends. But there was an eccentric in the
vicinity whom I knew only by sight and hearsay, a Sanscrit scholar who went by
the nickname of 'the Yogi.' One day, when my state of mind had grown
sufficiently unbearable, I paid a call on this man, whose solitariness and oddity I
had both smiled at and secretly admired. I went to his cell intending to talk with
him, but found him in meditation; he had adopted the ritual Hindu posture and
could not be reached at all. With a faint smile on his face, he hovered, as it were,
in total aloofness. I could do nothing but stand at the door and wait until he
returned from his absorption. This took a very long time, an hour or two hours,
and at last I grew tired and slid to the floor. There I sat, leaning against the wall,
continuing to wait. At the end I saw the man slowly awaken; he moved his head
slightly, stretched his shoulders, slowly uncrossed his legs, and as he was about
to stand, up his gaze fell upon me.

"'What do you want?' he asked.

"I stood up and said, without thinking and without really knowing what I was
saying:

'It's the sonatas of Andrea Gabrieli.'

"He stood up at this point, seated me in his lone chair, and perched himself on
the edge of the table. 'Gabrieli?' he said. 'What has he done to you with his
sonatas?'

"I began to tell him what had been happening to me, and to confess the
predicament I was in. He asked me about my background with an exactness that
seemed to me pedantic. He wanted to know about my studies of Gabrieli and the
sonata, at what hour I rose in the morning, how long I read, how much I
practiced, when were my mealtimes and when I went to bed. I had confided in
him, in fact imposed myself on him, so that I had to put up with his questions,
but they made me ashamed; they probed more and more mercilessly into details,
and forced me to an analysis of my whole intellectual and moral life during the
past weeks and months.

"Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and
said: 'Don't you see yourself where the fault lies?' But I could not see it. At
this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned
from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance,
and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only
to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that
it was high time for me to recover my self-control, arid to regain my energy
with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular
meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was
wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed
meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on
the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy
and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all
awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate
and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a
matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of
neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners' exercises in
meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking
into contemplation."

With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. "That is what happened
to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact
is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any
given time demands of us, the more dependent we are on meditation as a wellspring
of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And--I could if I
wished give you quite a few more examples of this--the more intensively a task
requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing
us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as
when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to
the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known
how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which
meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all
failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream
seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the
capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective.
Well, you know all this; it's taught during the first exercises, of course. But it
is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone
astray."

This story had just enough effect upon Joseph for him to apprehend the risk he
himself was running, so that he turned to his meditation exercises with renewed
seriousness. What really impressed him was the fact that the Master had for the
first time revealed to him something of his personal life, of his youth and early
studies. For the first time Joseph fully realized that even a demigod, even a
Master, had once been young and capable of erring. He felt gratitude, too, for the
confidence the revered Master had placed in him by making this confession. It
was possible for one to go astray, to flag, to make mistakes, to break rules, and
still to deal with all such difficulties, to find one's way back, and in the end
even to become a Master. Joseph overcame the crisis.

During the two or three years at Waldzell during which the friendship between
Plinio and Joseph continued, the school watched the spectacle of these
combative friends like a drama in which everyone had at least some small part,
from the headmaster to the youngest freshman. The two worlds, the two
principles, had become embodied in Knecht and Designori; each stimulated the
other; every disputation became a solemn and symbolic contest which concerned
everyone at the school. From every contact with his native soil on the holiday
visits home Plinio would bring back new energy; and from every withdrawal for
reflection, from every new book, every meditation exercise, every meeting with
the Magister Musicae Joseph also derived new energy, made himself better fitted
to be the representative and advocate of Castalia. As a child he had experienced
his first vocation. Now he experienced the second. These years shaped and forged
him into the perfect Castalian.

He had also some time ago completed his elementary lessons in the Glass Bead
Game and even then, during holidays and under the eye of a Games Director,
had begun sketching out his own Glass Bead Games. In this activity he now
discovered one of the most abundant sources of joy and relaxation. Not since he
had insatiably practiced harpsichord and piano pieces with Carlo Ferromonte had
anything done him so much good, so refreshed, strengthened, reassured, and
delighted him as did these first advances into the starry firmament of the Glass
Bead Game.

During these same years young Joseph Knecht wrote those poems which have
been preserved in Ferromonte's copy. It is quite possible that there were
originally more of them than have come down to us, and it may be assumed that
the poems, the earliest of which dates back to a time before Knecht's intro-
duction to the Glass Bead Game, helped him to carry out his role and to with-
stand the many tests of those critical years. Here and there in these poems,
some skillfully wrought and some hastily scribbled, every reader will discover
traces of the profound upheaval and crisis through which Knecht was then pass-
ing under the influence of Plinio. A good many of the lines sound a note of
profound disturbance, of fundamental doubts about himself and the meaning of
his life--until, in the poem entitled "The Glass Bead Game" he seems to have
attained belief and surrender. Incidentally, a measure of concession to Plin-
io's world, an element of rebellion against certain unwritten laws of Castalia,
is contained in the mere fact that he wrote these poems and even on occasion
showed them to several schoolmates. For while Castalia has in general renounc-
ed the production of works of art (even musical production is known and toler-
ated there only in the form of stylistically rigid composition exercises),
writing poetry was regarded as the most impossible, ridiculous, and prohibited
of conceivable acts. Thus these poems were anything but a game, anything but
an idle calligraphic amusement; it took high pressure to start this flow of
productivity, and a certain defiant courage was required to admit to the
writing of these verses.

It should also be mentioned that Plinio Designori likewise underwent con-
siderable change and development under the influence of his antagonist. This
was reflected in more than the refinement of his methods of argument. During
the comradely rivalry of those school years Plinio saw his opponent steadily
rising and maturing into an exemplary Castalian. The figure of his friend more
and more vigorously and vividly embodied for him the spirit of the Province.
Just as he himself had infected Joseph with some of the atmospheric turbulence
of his own world, he for his part inhaled the Castalian air and succumbed to its
charm and power. In his last year at the school, after a two-hour disputation on
the ideals and perils of monasticism, fought out in the presence of the highest
Glass Bead Game class, Plinio took Joseph out for a walk and made a confession
to him. We quote it from a letter of Ferromonte's:

"Of course I've known for a long time, Joseph, that you are not the credulous
Glass Bead Game player and Castalian saint whose part you have been playing
so splendidly. Each of us stands at an exposed spot in this battle, and each of
us probably knows that what he is fighting against rightfufiy exists and has its
undeniable value. You yourself take the side of intensive cultivation of the mind,
I the side of natural life. In our contest you have learned to track down the
dangers of the natural life and have made them your target. Your function has
been to point out how natural, naive living without discipline of the mind is
bound to become a mire into which men sink, reverting to bestiality. And I for
my part must remind you again and again how risky, dangerous, and ultimately
sterile is a life based purely upon mind. Good, each defends what he believes to
be primary, you mind and I nature. But don't take offense--it sometimes seems
to me that you actually and naively consider me an enemy of your Castalian
principles, a fellow who fundamentally regards your studies, exercises, and
games as mere tomfoolery, even though he briefly joins in them for one reason
or another. How wrong you would be if you really believed that, my friend. I'll
confess to you that I am infatuated with your hierarchy, that it often enthralls
me like happiness itself. I'll confess to you that some months ago, when I was
at home with my parents for a while, I had it out with my father and won his
permission for me to remain a Castalian and enter the Order if this should be my
desire and decision at the end of my schooldays. I was happy when he at last
gave his consent. As it happens, I shall not make use of his permission; I've
recently realized that. Not that I've lost my taste for it, not at all. But I more
and more see that for me to remain among you would mean escaping. It would be a
fine, a noble escape perhaps, but still an escape. I shall return and become a man
of the outside world, but one who continues grateful to your Castalia, who will
go on practicing a good many of your exercises, and will come every year to join
in the celebration of the great Glass Bead Game."

Knecht informed his friend Ferromonte of Plinio's confession with deep
emotion. And Ferromonte himself added, in the letter we have just cited: "To
me, as a musician, this confession of Plinio, to whom I had not always been
entirely fair, was like a musical experience. The contrast of world and Mind,
or of Plinio and Joseph, had before my eyes been transfigured from the conflict
of two irreconcilable principles into a double concerto."

When Plinio had come to the end of his four-year course and was about to return
home, he brought the headmaster a letter from his father inviting Joseph Knechf
to spend the coming vacation with him. This was an unusual proposal. Leaves
for journeys and stays outside the Pedagogic Province did exist, chiefly for
purposes of study. They were not so very rare, but were exceptional and
generally granted only to older and more seasoned researchers, never to younger
students still at school. But since the invitation had come from so highly
esteemed a family and personage, Headmaster Zbinden did not presume to reject
it on his own, but presented it to a committee of the Board of Educators. The
reply was a laconic refusal. The friends had to say good-by to each other.

"We'll try the invitation again sometime," Plinio said. "Sooner or later it
will work out. You must someday see my home and meet my family, and realize
that we are not just commercial-minded scum. I shall miss you very much. And
make sure, Joseph, that you rise quickly in this complicated Castalia of yours.
Of course you're highly suited to become a member of the hierarchy, but in my
opinion more at the top than the bottom of the heap--in spite of your name. I
prophesy a great future for you; one of these days you'll be a Magister and be
counted among the illustrious."

Joseph gave him a sad look.

"Go ahead and make fun of me," he said, struggling with the emotion of parting.
"I am not so ambitious as you, and if I should ever attain to some office, you will
long since have become president or mayor, university professor, or deputy.
Think kindly of us, Plinio, and of Castalia; don't become entirely estranged from
us. After all, there have to be a few people in the outside world who know more
about Castalia than the jokes they make about us out there."

They shook hands, and Plinio departed.

For his last year in Waldzell, Joseph remained out of the limelight. His exposed
and strenuous function as a more or less public personality had suddenly come to
an end. Castalia no longer needed a defender. Joseph devoted his free time
during that year chiefly to the Glass Bead Game, which enthralled him more and
more. A notebook of jottings from that period, dealing with the meaning and
theory of the Game, begins with the sentence: "The whole of both physical and
mental life is a dynamic phenomenon, of which the Glass Bead Game basically
comprehends only the aesthetic side, and does so predominantly as an image of
rhythmic processes."



　　　　　　　　　　　　　THREE

　　　　　　 YEARS OF FREEDOM



JOSEPH Knecht was about twenty-four years old at this time. With graduation from
Waldzell, his school days were over, and there now began his years of free study. With the
exception of his uneventful boyhood in Eschholz, these were probably the most serene and
happy years of his life. There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful
about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his first
ventures toward the infinite horizons of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his
illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the
boundlessness of the world of thought.

Especially for young men with gifts like those of Joseph Knecht, who have not been
driven by a single talent to concentrate on a specialty, but whose nature rather aims at
integration, synthesis, and universality, this springtide of free study is often a period of intense
happiness and very nearly of intoxication. Were it not preceded by the discipline of the elite
schools, by the psychic hygiene of meditation exercises and the lenient supervision of the Board
of Educators, this freedom would even be dangerous for such natures and might prove a nemesis
to many, as it used to be to innumerable highly gifted young men in the ages before our present
educational pattern was set, in the pre-Castalian centuries. The universities in those days literally
swarmed with young Faustian spirits who embarked with all sails set upon the high seas of
learning and academic freedom, and ran aground on all the shoals of untrammeled dilettantism.
Faust himself, after all, was the prototype of brilliant amateurishness and its consequent tragedy.

In Castalia, as it happens, the intellectual freedom of the student is infinitely greater than
it ever was at the universities of earlier ages, since the available materials and opportunities for
study are far ampler. Moreover, studies in Castalia are in no way restricted or colored by material
considerations, by ambition, timidity, straitened circumstances of the parents, prospects for
livelihood and career, and so on. In the academies, seminars, libraries, archives, and laboratories
of the Pedagogic Province every student is completely equal, no matter what his origins and
prospects. The hierarchy grades the student solely by his qualities of mind and character. On the
other hand most of the freedoms, temptations, and dangers to which so many talented youths
succumb at the secular universities simply do not exist in Castalia. Not that there is a dearth of
danger, passion, and bedazzlement there — how could these elements ever be completely absent
from human life? But at least certain opportunities for going off the rails, for disappointment and
disaster, have been eliminated. There is no danger of the Castalian student's becoming a drinker.
Nor can he waste the years of his youth in tomfoolery, or the empty braggadocio of secret
societies, as did some generations of students in olden times. Nor is he apt to make the discovery
someday that his degree was a mistake, that there are gaps in his preparatory education which
can never be filled. The Castalian order of things protects him against such blunders.

The danger of wasting himself on women or on losing himself in sports is also minimal.
As far as women are concerned, the Castalian student is not subject to the temptations and
dangers of marriage, nor is he oppressed by the prudery of a good many past eras which imposed
continence on students or else made them turn to more or less venal and sluttish women. Since
there is no marriage for the Castalians, love is not governed by a morality directed toward
marriage. Since the Castalian has no money and virtually no property, he also cannot purchase
love. It is customary in the Province for the daughters of the citizenry not to marry early, and in
the years before marriage they look upon students and scholars as particularly desirable lovers.
The young men, for their part, are not interested in birth and fortune, are prone to grant at least
equal importance to mental and emotional capacities, are usually endowed with imagination and
humor and, since they have no money, must make their repayment by giving more of themselves
than others would. In Castalia the sweetheart of a student does not ask herself: will he marry me?
She knows he will not. Actually, there have been occasions when he did; every so often an elite
student would return to the world by way of marriage, giving up Castalia and membership in the
Order. But these few, rare cases of apostasy in the history of the schools and of the Order amount
to little more than a curiosity.

After graduation from the preparatory schools the elite student truly enjoys a remarkable
degree of freedom and self-determination in choosing among the fields of knowledge and
research. Unless a student's own talents and interests dictate natural bounds from the start, the
only limit on this freedom is his obligation to present a plan of study for each semester. The
authorities oversee the execution of fhis plan in only the mildest way. For young men of versatile
talents and interests — and Knecht was one of these — the scope thus allowed him is wonderfully
enticing and a source of continual delight. The authorities permit such students, if they do not
drift into sheer idleness, almost paradisiacal freedom. The student may dabble in all sorts of
fields, combine the widest variety of subjects, fall in love with six or eight disciplines
simultaneously, or confine himself to a narrower selection from the beginning. Aside from
observing the general rules of morality that apply to the whole Province and the Order, nothing is
asked of him except presentation once a year of the record of the lectures he has attended, the
books he has read, and the research he has undertaken at the various institutes. His performance
comes in for closer check only when he attends technical courses and seminars, including
courses in the Glass Bead Game and at the Conservatory of Music. Here every student has to
take the official examinations and write the papers or do the work required by the head of the
seminar, as is only natural. But no one forces him to take such courses. For semesters or for
years he may, if he pleases, merely make use of the libraries and listen to lectures. Students who
take a long while before deciding upon a single field of knowledge thereby delay their admission
into the Order, but the authorities show great patience in allowing and even encouraging their
explorations of all possible disciplines and types of study. Aside from good moral conduct,
nothing is required of them except the composition of a "Life" every year.

It is to this old and much-mocked custom that we owe the three "Lives" by Knecht
written during his years of free study. These were, then, not a purely voluntary and unofficial,
not to say secret and more or less illicit kind of literary activity, such as his poems written at
Waldzell had been, but a normal and official assignment. Far back in the earliest days of the
Pedagogic Province the custom had arisen of requiring the younger students, those who had not
yet been admitted to the Order, to compose from time to time a special kind of essay or stylistic
exercise which was called a "Life." It was to be a fictitious autobiography set in any period of the
past the writer chose. The student's assignment was to transpose himself back to the
surroundings, culture, and intellectual climate of any earlier era and to imagine himself living a
suitable life in that period. Depending on the times and the fashion, imperial Rome, seventeenth-
century France, or fifteenth-century Italy might be the period most favored, or Periclean Athens
or Austria in the time of Mozart. Among language specialists it had become the custom to
compose their imaginary biographies in the language of the country and the style of the period in
which they were versed. Thus there had been highly ingenious Lives written in the style of the
Papal Curia at Rome around the year 1200, in monastic Latin, in the Italian of the "Cento
Novelle Antiche," in the French of Montaigne, and the baroque German of Martin Opitz.

A remnant of the ancient Asian doctrine of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls
survived in this playful, highly flexible form. All teachers and students were familiar with the
concept that their present existence might have been preceded by others, in other bodies, at other
times, under other conditions. To be sure they did not believe this in any strict sense; there was
no element of dogma in the idea. Rather, it was an exercise, a game for the imaginative faculties,
to conceive of oneself in different conditions and surroundings. In writing such Lives students
made a stab at a cautious penetration of past cultures, times, and countries, just as they did in
many seminars on stylistics, and in the Glass Bead Game as well. They learned to regard their
own persons as masks, as the transitory garb of an entelechy. The custom of writing such Lives
had its charm, and a good many solid benefits as well, or it probably would not have endured for
so long.

Incidentally, there was a rather considerable number of students who not only more or
less believed in the idea of reincarnation, but also in the truth of their own fictional Lives. Thus
the majority of these imaginary pre-existences were not merely stylistic exercises and historical
studies, but also creations of wishful thinking and exalted self-portraits. The authors cast
themselves as the characters they longed to become. They portrayed their dream and their ideal.
Furthermore, from the pedagogic point of view the Lives were not a bad idea at all. They
provided a legitimate channel for the creative urge of youth. Although serious, creative literary
work had been frowned on for generations, and replaced partly by scholarship, partly by the
Glass Bead Game, youth's artistic impulse had not been crushed. In these Lives, which were
often elaborated into small novels, it found a permissible means of expression. What is more,
while writing these Lives some of the authors took their first steps into the land of self-
knowledge.

Incidentally, the students frequently used their Lives for critical and revolutionary outbursts
on the contemporary world and on Castalia. The teachers usually regarded such sallies
with understanding benevolence. In addition, these Lives were extremely revealing to the
teachers during those periods in which the students enjoyed maximum freedom and were subject
to no close supervision. The compositions often provided astonishingly clear insight into the
intellectual and moral state of the authors.

Three such Lives written by Joseph Knecht have been preserved. We intend to reproduce
their full text, and regard them as possibly the most valuable part of our book. There is much
room for conjecture as to whether he wrote only these three Lives, or whether there might have
been others which have been lost. All we know definitely is that after Knecht handed in his third,
"Indian" Life, the Secretariat of the Board of Educators suggested that if he wrote any additional
Lives he ought to set them in an era historically closer to the present and more richly
documented, and that he should pay more attention to historical detail. We know from anecdotes
and letters that he thereupon actually engaged in preliminary research for a Life set in the
eighteenth century. He cast himself as a Swabian pastor who subsequently turned from the
service of the Church to music, who had been a disciple of Johann Albrecht Bengel, a friend of
Oetinger, and for a while a guest of Zinzendorf s congregation of Moravian Brethren. We know
that he was reading and taking notes on a quantity of old and often out-of-the-way books on
church organization, Pietism, and Zinzendorf, as well as on the liturgy and church music of the
period. We know also that he was fascinated with Oetinger, the charismatic prelate, and that he
felt genuine love and veneration for Magister Bengel; he went to some pains to have a
photograph made of Bengel's portrait and for a while had the picture standing on his desk. He
also honestly tried to write an account of Zinzendorf, who both intrigued and repelled him. But
in the end he dropped this project, content with what he had learned from it. He declared that he
had lost the capacity for making a Life out of these materials through having studied the subject
from too many angles and accumulated too many details. In view of this statement, we may
justifiably regard the three Lives he did complete rather as the creations of a poetic spirit than the
works of a scholar. In saying this we do not think we are doing them any injustice.

In addition to the freedom of the student at last permitted to range at will in self-chosen
studies, Knecht now enjoyed a different kind of freedom and relaxation. He had not, after all,
been merely a student like all the others; he had not only submitted to the strict training, the
exacting schedules, the careful supervision and scrutiny of the teachers, in a word to all the rigor
of elite schooling. For along with all that, because of his relationship to Plinio he had borne the
far greater strain of a responsibility which had in part spurred him to the utmost of his
potentialities, in part drawn heavily on his energies. In assuming the role of public advocate of
Castalia he had taken on a responsibility that was really too much for his years and his strength.
He had run grave risks, and succeeded only by applying excessive will power and talent. In fact,
without the Music Master's powerful assistance from afar, he would not have been able to carry
his assignment to its conclusion.

At the end of those unusual years at Waldzell we find him, a young man of twenty-four,
mature beyond his age and somewhat overstrained, but amazingly bearing no visible traces of
damage. But the degree to which his whole nature had been taxed and brought to the verge of
exhaustion is apparent, although there is no direct documentation for it, from the way he
employed the first few years of that freedom he had at last attained, and for which he had no
doubt deeply yearned. Having stood in so conspicuous a position during his last years at school,
he immediately and completely withdrew from the public eye. Indeed, when we seek the traces
of his life at that time, we have the impression that if he could he would have made himself
invisible. No surroundings and no society seemed undemanding enough for him, no mode of
living private enough. For example, he replied curtly and reluctantly to several long and
tempestuous letters from Designori, then ceased to answer altogether. The famous student
Knecht vanished and could no longer be located; but in Waldzell his fame continued to flower,
and in time became almost a legend.

At the beginning of his years of free study he avoided Waldzell for the reasons given.
This meant that for the time being he eschewed the graduate and postgraduate courses in the
Glass Bead Game. But although to the superficial observer Knecht was ostentatiously neglecting
the Game, we know that on the contrary the entire seemingly wayward and disconnected, and
certainly altogether unusual course of his studies had been influenced by the Glass Bead Game
and led back to it and to the service of the Game. We mean to discuss this somewhat at length,
for this trait was characteristic. Joseph Knecht employed his freedom for study in the strangest
and most idiosyncratic fashion, one that revealed an astonishing youthful genius. During his
years at Waldzell he had, as was usual, taken the official introduction to the Glass Bead Game
and the review course as well. During his last school year and among his friends he already had
the reputation of being an excellent player. But then he was gripped with such a passion for this
Game of games that after completing another course and while still in school he had been
admitted to a course for players of the second stage, which was a very rare distinction indeed.

Some years later he told his friend and later assistant, Fritz Tegularius (who had at school
taken the review course along with him) of an experience which not only decided his destiny as a
Glass Bead Game player, but also greatly influenced the course of his studies. The letter is
extant; the passage runs: "Let me remind you of the time the two of us, assigned to the same
group, were so eagerly working on our first sketches for Glass Bead Games. Do you recall a
certain day and a certain game? Our group leader had given us various suggestions and proposed
all sorts of themes for us to choose from. We had just arrived at the delicate transition from
astronomy, mathematics, and physics to the sciences of language and history, and the leader was
a virtuoso in the art of setting traps for eager beginners like us and luring us on to the thin ice of
impermissible abstractions and analogies. He would slip into our hands tempting baubles taken
from etymology and comparative linguistics, and enjoyed seeing us grab them and come to grief.
We counted Greek quantities until we were worn out, only to feel the rug pulled out from under
us when he suddenly confronted us with the possibility, in fact the necessity, of accentual instead
of a quantitative scansion, and so on. In formal terms he did his job brilliantly, and quite
properly, although I did not like the spirit of it. He showed us false trails and lured us into faulty
conjectures, partly with the good intention of familiarizing us with the perils, but also a little in
order to laugh at us for being such stupid boys and to instil a heavy dose of skepticism into those
of us who were most enthusiastic about the Game. And yet as things turned out it happened
under his instruction and in the course of one of his complicated trick experiments — we were
timidly and awkwardly trying to sketch a halfway decent Game problem — that I was all at once
seized by the meaning and the greatness of our Game, and was shaken by it to the core of my
being. We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up
the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which
had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the
way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many
generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole
intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at
the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that
despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and
downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would
survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as
well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the
language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-
meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single
examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the
world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized
in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the
interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between
heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

"Of course by that time I had attended many a well-constructed and well-executed Game.
Listening, I had often been exalted and overjoyed by the insights such Games afforded; but up to
that time I had repeatedly been inclined to doubt the real value and importance of the Game.
After all, every neatly solved problem in mathematics could provide intellectual pleasure; every
good piece of music could exalt and expand the soul toward universality when heard, and even
more when played; and every reverent meditation could soothe the heart and tune it to harmony
with the universe. But perhaps for that very reason, my doubts whispered, the Glass Bead Game
was merely a formal art, a clever skill, a witty combination, so that it would be better not to play
this Game, but to occupy oneself with uncontaminated mathematics and good music.

"But now for the first time I had heard the inner voice of the Game itself, its meaning. It
had reached me and penetrated me, and since that moment I have believed that our royal game is
truly a lingua sacra, a sacred and divine language. You will remember, for you remarked on it
yourself at the time, that a change had taken place within me, a summons had come to me. I can
compare it only to that unforgettable call which once lifted my heart and transformed my life
when as a boy I was tested by the Magister Musicae and summoned to Castalia. You noticed it; I
felt that at the time, although you said not a word about it. Let us say no more about it today. But
now I have something to ask you, and in order to explain my request I must tell you something
that no one else knows or is to know: that my seemingly disorganized studies at the present time
are not the result of whim, but of a definite underlying plan. You will recall, at least in general
outline, the Glass Bead Game exercise we constructed at that time, as pupils in the Third Course,
and with the leader's assistance — in the course of which I heard that voice and experienced my
vocation as a lusor. That game began with a rhythmic analysis of a fugal theme and in the center
of it was a sentence attributed to Confucius. Now I am studying that entire game from beginning
to end. That is, I am working through each of its phrases, translating it from the language of the
Game back into its original language, into mathematics, ornament, Chinese, Greek, and so on. At
least this once in my life I intend to restudy and reconstruct systematically the entire content of a
Glass Bead Game. I have already finished the first part, and it has taken me two years. Of course
it is going to cost me quite a few years more. But since we are granted our famous freedom of
study in Castalia, this is how I mean to use it. I am familiar with the objections to such a
procedure. Most of our teachers would say: We have devoted several centuries to inventing and
elaborating the Glass Bead Game as a universal language and method for expressing all
intellectual concepts and all artistic values and reducing them to a common denominator. Now
you come along and want to check over everything to see if it is correct. That will take you a
lifetime, and you will regret it.

"Well, I shall not take a lifetime and I hope I won't regret it. And now for my request.
Since at present you are working in the Game Archives and I for special reasons prefer to keep
away from Waldzell for a good while longer, I hope you will answer quite a barrage of questions
for me every so often. That is, I shall be asking you to send me from the Archives the
unabbreviated forms of the official clefs and symbols for all sorts of themes. I am counting on
you, and counting on your asking reciprocal favors as soon as there is anything I can do for you."

Perhaps this is the place to cite that other passage from Knecht's letters which also deals
with the Glass Bead Game, although the letter in question, addressed to the Music Master, was
written at least a year or two later. "I imagine," Knecht wrote to his patron, "that one can be an
excellent Glass Bead Game player, even a virtuoso, and perhaps even a thoroughly competent
Magister Ludi, without having any inkling of the real mystery of the Game and its ultimate
meaning. It might even be that one who does guess or know the truth might prove a greater
danger to the Game, were he to become a specialist in the Game, or a Game leader. For the dark
interior, the esoterics of the Game, points down into the One and All, into those depths where the
eternal Atman eternally breathes in and out, sufficient unto itself. One who had experienced the
ultimate meaning of the Game within himself would by that fact no longer be a player; he would
no longer dwell in the world of multiplicity and would no longer be able to delight in invention,
construction, and combination, since he would know altogether different joys and raptures.
Because I think I have come close to the meaning of the Glass Bead Game, it will be better
for me and for others if I do not make the Game my profession, but instead shift to music."

The Music Master, who usually confined his correspondence to a minimum, was evidently
troubled by these remarks and replied with a rather lengthy piece of friendly admonition:
"It is good that you yourself do not require a master of the Game to be an 'esoteric' in
your sense of the word, for I hope you wrote that without irony. A Game Master or teacher
who was primarily concerned with being close enough to the 'innermost meaning' would be a
very bad teacher. To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my
pupils about the 'meaning' of music; if there is one, it does not need my explanations. On the
other I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths
nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for the 'meaning,' but
do not imagine that it can be taught. Once upon a time the philosophers of history ruined half of
world history with their efforts to teach such 'meaning'; they inaugurated the Age of the
Feuilleton and are partly to blame for quantities of spilled blood. If I were introducing pupils to
Homer or Greek tragedy, say, I would also not try to tell them that the poetry is one of the
manifestations of the divine, but would endeavor to make the poetry accessible to them by
imparting a precise knowledge of its linguistic and metrical strategies. The task of the teacher
and scholar is to study means, cultivate tradition, and preserve the purity of methods, not to deal
in incommunicable experiences which are reserved to the elect — who often enough pay a high
price for this privilege. "

There is no other mention of the Glass Bead Game and its "esoteric" aspect in all the rest
of Knecht's correspondence of that period. Indeed, he does not seem to have written many letters,
or else some of them have been lost. At any rate, the largest and best-preserved correspondence,
that with Ferromonte, deals almost entirely with problems of music and musical stylistic
analysis.

Thus there was a special meaning and resolution behind the peculiar zigzag course of
Knecht's studies, which consisted in nothing less than the circumstantial retracing and prolonged
analysis of a single Game pattern. In order to assimilate the contents of this one pattern, which
the schoolboys had composed as an exercise within a few days, and which could be read off in a
quarter hour in the language of the Glass Bead Game, he spent year after year sitting in lecture
halls and libraries, studying Froberger and Alessandro Scarlatti, fugues and sonata form,
reviewing mathematics, learning Chinese, working through a system of tonal figuration and the
Feustelian theory of the correspondence between the scale of colors and the musical keys.

We may ask why he had chosen this toilsome, eccentric, and above all lonely path, for his
ultimate goal (outside of Castalia, people would say: his choice of profession) was undoubtedly
the Glass Bead Game. He might freely have entered one of the institutes of the Vicus Lusorum,
the settlement of Glass Bead Game players in Waldzell, as a guest scholar. In that case all the
special studies connected with the Game would have been made easier for him. Advice and
information on all questions of detail would have been available to him at any time, and in
addition he could have pursued his studies among other scholars in the same field, young men
with the same devotion to the Game, instead of struggling alone in a state that often amounted to
voluntary banishment. Be that as it may, he went his own way. We suspect that he avoided
Waldzell partly to expunge as far as possible from his own mind and the minds of others the
memory of his role as a student there, partly so that he would not stumble into a similar role
among the community of Glass Bead Game players. For he probably bore away the feeling from
those early days that he was predestined to become a leader and spokesman, and he did all that
he could to outwit the obtrusiveness of fate. He sensed in advance the weight of responsibility;
he could already feel it toward his fellow students from Waldzell, who went on adulating him
even though he withdrew from them. And he felt it especially toward Tegularius, who would go
through fire and water for him — this he knew instinctively.

Therefore he sought seclusion and contemplation, while his destiny tried to propel him
forward into the public realm. It is in these terms that we imagine his state of mind at the time.
But there was another important factor that deterred him from taking the usual courses at the
higher Glass Bead Game academies and made an outsider of him. That was an inexorable urge
toward research arising from his former doubts about the Glass Bead Game. To be sure, he had
once tasted the experience that the Game could be played in a supreme and sacred sense; but he
had also seen that the majority of players and students of the Game, and even some of the leaders
and teachers, by no means shared that lofty and sacramental feeling for the Game. They did not
regard the Game language as a lingua sacra, but more as an ingenious kind of stenography. They
practiced the Game as an interesting or amusing specialty, an intellectual sport or an arena for
ambition. In fact, as his letter to the Music Master shows, he already sensed that the search for
ultimate meaning does not necessarily determine the quality of the player, that its superficial
aspects were also essential to the Game, that it comprised technique, science, and social
institution. In short, he had doubts and divided feelings; the Game was a vital question for him,
had become the chief problem of his life, and he was by no means disposed to let well-meaning
spiritual guides ease his struggles or benignly smiling teachers dismiss them as trivial.

Naturally he could have made any one of the tens of thousands of recorded Glass Bead
Games and the millions of possible games the basis of his studies. He knew this and therefore
proceeded from that chance Game plan that he and his schoolmates had composed in an
elementary course. It was the game in which he had for the first time grasped the meaning of all
Glass Bead Games and experienced his vocation as a player. During those years he kept with
him at all times an outline of that Game, noted down in the usual shorthand. In the symbols,
ciphers, signatures, and abbreviations of the Game language an astronomical formula, the
principles of form underlying an old sonata, an utterance of Confucius, and so on, were written
down. A reader who chanced to be ignorant of the Glass Bead Game might imagine such a Game
pattern as rather similar to the pattern of a chess game, except that the significances of the pieces
and the potentialities of their relationships to one another and their effect upon one another
multiplied manyfold and an actual content must be ascribed to each piece, each constellation,
each chess move, of which this move, configuration, and so on is the symbol.

Knecht's studies went beyond the task of acquainting himself in the utmost detail with the
contents, principles, books, and systems contained in the Game plan, and retracting as he went
a way back through various cultures, sciences, languages, arts, and centuries. He had also set
himself the task that none of his teachers even recognized, of employing these objects to check
in detail the systems and possibilities of expression in the art of the Glass Bead Game.

To anticipate his results: here and there he found a gap, an inadequacy, but on the whole
our Glass Bead Game withstood his stringent reassessment. Otherwise he would not have
returned to it at the end of his work.

If we were writing a study in cultural history, a good many of the places and scenes of
Knecht's student days would certainly merit description. As far as possible he preferred places
where he could work alone, or with only a very few others, and to some of these places he
retained a lifelong grateful attachment. He frequently stayed in Monteport, sometimes as the
Music Master's guest, sometimes as a participant in a musicological seminar. Twice we find him
in Hirsland, the headquarters of the Order, as a participant in the "Great Exercise," the twelve-
day period of fasting and meditation. He used later to tell his intimates with special affection
about the "Bamboo Grove," the lovely hermitage which was the scene of his I Ching studies.
There he learned and experienced things of crucial importance. There, too, guided by a
wonderful premonition or Providence, he found unique surroundings and an extraordinary
person: the founder and inmate of the Chinese hermitage, who was called Elder Brother. We
think it proper to describe at greater length this most remarkable episode in his years of free
study.

Knecht had begun his studies of the Chinese language and classics in the famous Far
Eastern College which for generations had been affiliated to St. Urban's, the academic complex
devoted to classical philology. There he had made rapid progress in reading and writing and also
struck up friendships with several of the Chinese working there, and had learned a number of the
odes of the Shih Ching by heart. In the second year of his stay he turned to a more and more
intense study of the I Ching, the Book of Changes. The Chinese provided him with all sorts of
information, but no introductory course; there was no teacher available in the college, and after
Knecht had repeatedly petitioned them for an instructor for a thorough study of the I Ching, he
was told about Elder Brother and his hermitage.

It had become apparent to Knecht that his interest in the Book of Changes was leading him
into a field which the teachers at the college preferred to keep at a distance, and he therefore
grew more cautious in his inquiries. Now, as he made efforts to obtain further information about
this legendary Elder Brother, it became obvious to him that the hermit enjoyed a measure of
respect, and indeed a degree of fame, but more as an eccentric loner than as a scholar. Knecht
sensed that he would have to help himself; he finished a paper he had begun for a seminar as
quickly as possible, and took his leave. On foot, he made his way to the region in which the
mysterious man, perhaps a sage and Master, perhaps a fool, had long ago established his Bamboo
Grove.

He had gathered a few bits of information about the hermit. Some twenty-five years before,
the man had been the most promising student in the Chinese Department. He seemed to have
been born for these studies, outdid his best teachers, both Chinese by birth and Westerners,
in the technique of brush writing and the deciphering of ancient texts, but became somewhat
notorious for the zeal with which he also tried to make himself into a Chinese in outward matters
also. Thus he obstinately refused to address his superiors, from the instructor of a seminar to the
Masters, by their titles, as all other students did. Instead, he called them "My Elder Brother,"
until at last this appellation became attached to himself as a nickname. He devoted special
attention to the oracular game of the I Ching, and developed a masterly skill at practicing it with
the traditional yarrow stalks. Along with the ancient commentaries on the Book of Changes, his
favorite book was the philosophical work of Chuang Tzu. Evidently the rationalistic, somewhat
antimystical, and declaredly Confucian spirit of the Chinese Department of the college, as
Knecht encountered it, had already been prevalent at that time, for one day Elder Brother left the
Institute, which would gladly have kept him as a teacher, and set out on a walking tour, armed
with brush, Chinese ink saucer, and two or three books. He made his way to the southern part of
the country, turning up here and there to visit for a while with brethren of the Order. He looked
for and finally found the suitable spot for the hermitage he planned, stubbornly bombarded both
the secular authorities and the Order with written and oral petitions until they granted him
the right to settle there and cultivate the area. Ever since, he had been living in an idyllic retreat
strictly governed by ancient Chinese principles. Some referred to him with amusement as a
crank, others venerated him as a kind of saint. But apparently he was content with himself and at
peace with the world, devoting his days to meditation and the copying of ancient scrolls
whenever he was not occupied with his Bamboo Grove, which sheltered from the north wind a
carefully laid out Chinese miniature garden.

Joseph Knecht, then, tramped toward this hermitage, making frequent stops to rest,
delighting in the landscape that lay smiling beneath him as soon as he had climbed through the
mountain passes, stretching southward in a blue haze, with sunlit terraced vineyards, brown stone
walls alive with lizards, stately chestnut groves, a piquant mingling of southland and high
mountain country. It was late afternoon when he reached the Bamboo Grove. He entered and
looked with astonishment upon a Chinese pavilion set in the midst of a curious garden, with a
splashing fountain fed by a wooden pipe. The overflow ran along a gravel bed into a masonry
basin, in whose crevices all sorts of green plants flourished. A few goldfish swam around in the
still, crystalline water. Fragile and peaceful, the feathery crowns of the bamboos swayed on their
strong, slender shafts. The sward was punctuated by stone slabs carved with inscriptions in the
classical style.

A frail man dressed in tan linen, glasses over blue eyes that bore a tentative look,
straightened up from a flower bed over which he had been bending and slowly approached the
visitor. His manner was not unfriendly, but it had that somewhat awkward shyness rather
common among solitaries and recluses. He looked inquiringly at Knecht and waited for what he
had to say. With some embarrassment Knecht spoke the Chinese words he had already
formulated: "The young disciple takes the liberty of paying his respects to Elder Brother."

"The well-bred guest is welcome," Elder Brother said. "May a young colleague always be
welcome to a bowl of tea and a little agreeable conversation; and a bed for the night may be
found for him, if this is desired."

Knecht kowtowed, expressed his thanks, and was led into the pavilion and served tea.
Then he was shown the garden, the carved slabs, the pond, the goldfish, and was even told the
age of the fish. Until suppertime they sat under the swaying bamboos exchanging courtesies,
verses from odes, and sayings from the classical writers. They looked at the flowers and took
pleasure in the fading pinks of sunset along the mountain ranges. Then they re-entered the house.
Elder Brother served bread and fruit, cooked an excellent pancake for each of them on a tiny
stove, and after they had eaten he asked in German the purpose of his visit, and in German
Knecht explained why he had come and what he desired, which was to stay as long as Elder
Brother permitted him, and to become his disciple.

"We shall discuss that tomorrow," the hermit said, and showed his guest to a bed.

Next morning Knecht sat down by the goldfish pool and gazed into the cool small world
of darkness and light and magically shimmering colors, where the bodies of the golden fish
glided in the dark greenish blueness and inky blackness. Now and then, just when the entire
world seemed enchanted, asleep forever in a dreamy spell, the fish would dart with a supple and
yet alarming movement, like flashes of crystal and gold, through the somnolent darkness. He
looked down, becoming more and more absorbed, daydreaming rather than meditating, and was
not conscious when Elder Brother stepped softly out of the house, paused, and stood for a long
time watching his bemused guest. When Knecht at last shook off his abstraction and stood up, he
was no longer there, but his voice soon called from inside an invitation to tea. They greeted each
other briefly, drank tea, and sat listening in the matutinal stillness to the sound of the small jet of
water from the fountain, a melody of eternity. Then the hermit stood up, busied himself here and
there about the irregularly shaped room, now and then glancing, blinking rapidly, at Knecht.
Suddenly he asked: "Are you ready to don your shoes and continue your journeying?"

Knecht hesitated. Then he said: "If it must be so, I am ready."

"And if it should chance that you stay here a little while, are you ready to be obedient and
to keep as still as a goldfish?"

Again Knecht said he was ready.

"It is well," Elder Brother said. "Now I shall lay the stalks and consult the oracle."

While Knecht sat and looked on with an awe equal to his curiosity, keeping "as still as a
goldfish," Elder Brother fetched from a wooden beaker, which was rather a kind of quiver, a
handful of sticks. These were the yarrow stalks. He counted them out carefully, returned one part
of the bundle to the vessel, laid a stalk aside, divided the rest into two equal bundles, kept one in
his left hand, and with the sensitive fingertips of his right hand took tiny little clusters from the
pack in his left. He counted these and laid them aside until only a few stalks remained. These he
held between two fingers of his left hand. After thus reducing one bundle by ritual counting to a
few stalks, he followed the same procedure with the other bundle. He laid the counted stalks to
one side, then went through both bundles again, one after the other, counting, clamping small
remnants of bundles between two fingers. His fingers performed all this with economical
motions and quiet agility; it looked like an occult game of skill governed by strict rules, practiced
thousands of times and brought to a high degree of virtuoso dexterity. After he had gone through
the same process several times, three small bundles remained. From the number of stalks in them
he read an ideograph which he drew with a tapering brush on a small piece of paper. Now the
whole complicated procedure began anew; the sticks were divided again into two equal bundles,
counted, laid aside, thrust between fingers, until in the end again three tiny bundles remained
which resulted in a second ideograph. Moved about like dancers, making very soft, dry clicks,
the stalks came together, changed places, formed bundles, were separated, were counted anew;
they shifted positions rhythmically, with a ghostly sureness. At the end of each process an
ideograph was written, until finally the positive and negative symbols stood in six lines one
above the other. The stalks were gathered up and carefully replaced in their container. The sage
sat crosslegged on the floor of reed matting, for a long time silently examining the result of the
augury on the sheet of paper.

"It is the sign Mong," he said. "This sign bears the name: youthful folly. Above the mountain,
below the water; above Gen, below Kan. At the foot of the fountain the spring bubbles forth,
the symbol of youth. The verdict reads:

　　　　　Youthful folly wins success.
　　　　　I do not seek the young fool,
　　　　　The young fool seeks me.
　　　　　At the first oracle I give knowledge.
　　　　　If he asks again, it is importunity.
　　　　　If he importunes, I give no knowledge.
　　　　　Perseverance is beneficial."

Knecht had been holding his breath from sheer suspense. In the ensuing silence he
involuntarily gave a deep sigh of relief. He did not dare to ask. But he thought he had
understood: the young fool had turned up; he would be permitted to stay. Even while he was still
enthralled by the sublime marionettes' dance of fingers and sticks, which he had watched for so
long and which looked so persuasively meaningful, the result took hold of him. The oracle had
spoken; it had decided in his favor.

We would not have described this episode in such detail if Knecht himself had not so
frequently related it to his friends with a certain relish. Now we shall return to our scholarly
account.

Knecht remained at the Bamboo Grove for months and learned to manipulate the yarrow
stalks almost as well as his teacher. The latter spent an hour a day with him, practicing counting
the sticks, imparting the grammar and symbolism of the oracular language, and drilling him in
writing and memorizing the sixty-four signs. He read to Knecht from ancient commentaries, and
every so often, on particularly good days, told him a story by Chuang Tzu. For the rest, the
disciple learned to tend the garden, wash the brushes, and prepare the Chinese ink. He also
learned to make soup and tea, gather brushwood, observe the weather, and handle the Chinese
calendar. But his rare attempts to introduce the Glass Bead Game and music into their sparing
conversations yielded no results whatsoever; they seemed to fall upon deaf ears, or else were
turned aside with a forbearing smile or a proverb such as, "Dense clouds, no rain," or, "Nobility
is without flaw." But when Knecht had a small clavichord sent from Monteport and spent an
hour a day playing, Elder Brother made no objection. Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that
he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead
Game. Elder Brother laughed. "Go ahead and try," he exclaimed. "You'll see how it turns out.
Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener
would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove."

But enough of this. We shall mention only the one further fact that some years later,
when Knecht was already a highly respected personage in Waldzell and invited Elder Brother to
give a course there, he received no answer.

Afterward Joseph Knecht described the months he lived in the Bamboo Grove as an
unusually happy time. He also frequently referred to it as the "beginning of my awakening" —
and in fact from that period on the image of "awakening" turns up more and more often in his
remarks, with a meaning similar to although not quite the same as that he had formerly attributed
to the image of vocation. It could be assumed that the "awakening" signified knowledge of
himself and of the place he occupied within the Castalian and the general human order of things;
but it seems to us that the accent increasingly shifts toward self-knowledge in the sense that from
the "beginning of his awakening" Knecht came closer and closer to a sense of his special, unique
position and destiny, while at the same time, the concepts and categories of the traditional
hierarchy of the world and of the special Castalian hierarchy became for him more and more
relative matters.

His Chinese studies were far from concluded during his stay in the Bamboo Grove. They
continued, and Knecht made particular efforts to acquire a knowledge of ancient Chinese music.
Everywhere in the older Chinese writers he encountered praise of music as one of the primal
sources of all order, morality, beauty, and health. This broad, ethical view of music was familiar
to him from of old, for the Music Master could be regarded as the very embodiment of it.

Without ever forsaking the fundamental plan of his studies, which as we have seen he
outlined in his letter to Fritz Tegularius, he pushed forward energetically on a broad front
wherever he scented an element of essential value to himself, that is to say, wherever the path of
"awakening," on which he had already set out, seemed to lead him. One of the positive results of
his period of apprenticeship with Elder Brother was that he overcame his resistance against
returning to Waldzell. Henceforth he participated in one of the advanced courses there every
year, and without quite realizing how it had happened he became a personage regarded with
interest and esteem in the Vicus Lusorum. He belonged to that central and most sensitive organ
of the entire Game organization, that anonymous group of players of proven worth in whose
hands lay the destinies of the Game at any given time, or at least the type of play that happened
to be in fashion.

Officials of the Game institutes belonged to but did not dominate this group, which
usually met in several remote, quiet rooms of the Game Archives. There the members beguiled
their time with critical studies of the Game, championing the inclusion of new subject areas, or
arguing for their exclusion, debating for or against certain constantly shifting tastes in regard to
the form, the procedures, the sporting aspects of the Glass Bead Game. Everyone who had made
a place for himself in this group was a virtuoso of the Game; each knew to a hair the talents and
peculiarities of all the others. The atmosphere was like that in the corridors of a government
ministry or an aristocratic club where the rulers and those who will take over their respons-
ibilities in the near future meet and get to know one another. A muted, polished tone prevailed
in this group. Its members were ambitious without showing it, keen-eyed and critical to excess.
Many in Castalia, and some in the rest of the country outside the Province, regarded this
elite as the ultimate flower of Castalian tradition, the cream of an exclusive intellectual
aristocracy, and a good many youths dreamed for years of some day belonging to it themselves.
To others, however, this elect circle of candidates for the higher reaches in the hierarchy of the
Glass Bead Game seemed odious and debased, a clique of haughty idlers, brilliant but spoiled
geniuses who lacked all feeling for life and reality, an arrogant and fundamentally parasitic
company of dandies and climbers who had made a silly game, a sterile self-indulgence of the
mind, their vocation and the content of their life.

Knecht was untouched by either of these attitudes. It did not matter to him whether he
figured in student gossip as some sort of phenomenon or as a parvenu and climber. What was
important to him were his studies, all of which now centered around the Game. Another
preoccupation was, perhaps, that one question of whether the Game really was the supreme
achievement of Castalia and worth devoting one's life to. For even as he was familiarizing
himself with the ever more recondite mysteries of the Game's laws and potentialities, even as he
became more and more at home in the labyrinths of the Archives and the complex inner world of
the Game's symbolism, his doubts had by no means been silenced. He had already learned by
experience that faith and doubt belong together, that they govern each other like inhaling and
exhaling, and that his very advances in all aspects of the Game's mirocosm naturally sharpened
his eyes to all the dubiousness of the Game. For a little while, perhaps, the idyll in the Bamboo
Grove had reassured him, or perhaps one might say confused him. The example of Elder Brother
had shown him that there were ways of escaping from this dubiousness. It was possible, for
example, as that recluse had done, to turn oneself into a Chinese, shut oneself off behind a
garden hedge, and live in a self-sufficient and beautiful kind of perfection. One might also
become a Pythagorean or a monk and scholastic — but these were still escapes, renunciations of
universality possible and permissible only to a few. They involved renunciation of the present
and the future in favor of something perfect enough, but past. Knecht had sensed in good time
that this type of escape was not the way for him. But what then was the way for him? Aside from
his great talent for music and for the Glass Bead Game, he was aware of still other forces within
himself, a certain inner independence, a self-reliance which by no means barred him or hampered
him from serving, but demanded of him that he serve only the highest master. And this strength,
this independence, this self-reliance, was not just a trait in his character, it was not just inturned
and effective only upon himself; it also affected the outside world.

As early as his years at school, and especially during the period of his contest with Plinio
Designori, Joseph Knecht had often noticed that many schoolmates his own age, but even more
the younger boys, liked him, sought his friendship, and moreover tended to let him dominate
them. They asked him for advice, put themselves under his influence. Ever since, this experience
had been repeated frequently. It had its pleasant and flattering side; it satisfied ambition and
strengthened self-confidence. But it also had another, a dark and terrifying side. For there was
something bad and unpalatable about the attitude one took toward these schoolmates so eager
for advice, guidance, and an example, about the impulse to despise them for their lack of self-
reliance and dignity, and about the occasional secret temptation to make them (at least in
thought) into obedient slaves. Moreover, during the time with Plinio he had had a taste of the
responsibility, strain, and psychological burden which is the price paid for every brilliant and
publicly representative position. He knew also that the Music Master sometimes felt weighed
down by his own position. It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine
before others, but power also had its perditions and perils. History, after all, consisted of an
unbroken succession of rulers, leaders, bosses, and commanders who with extremely rare
exceptions had all begun well and ended badly. All of them, at least so they said, had striven for
power for the sake of the good; afterward they had become obsessed and numbed by power and
loved it for its own sake.

What he must do was to sanctify and make wholesome the power Nature had bestowed
on him by placing it in the service of the hierarchy. This was something he had always taken for
granted. But where was his rightful place, where would his energies be put to best use and bear
fruit? The capacity to attract and more or less to influence others, especially those younger than
himself, would of course have been useful to an army officer or a politician; but in Castalia there
was no place for such occupations. Here these qualities were useful only to the teacher and
educator, but Knecht felt hardly drawn to such work. If it had been a question of his own desires
alone, he would have preferred the life of the independent scholar to all others — or else that of
a Glass Bead Game player. And in reaching this conclusion he once more faced the old,
tormenting question: was this game really the highest, really the sovereign in the realm of the
intellect? Was it not, in spite of everything and everyone, in the end merely a game after all? Did
it really merit full devotion, lifelong service? Generations ago this famous Game had begun as a
kind of substitute for art, and for many it was gradually developing into a kind of religion,
allowing highly trained intellects to indulge in contemplation, edification, and devotional
exercises.

Obviously, the old conflict between aesthetics and ethics was going on in Knecht. The ques-
tion never fully expressed but likewise never entirely suppressed, was the very one that had
now and then erupted, dark and threatening, from beneath the surface of the schoolboy poems he
had written in Waldzell. That question was addressed not just to the Glass Bead Game, but to
Castalia as a whole.

There was a period when this whole complex of problems troubled him so deeply that he
was always dreaming of debates with Designori. And one day, as he was strolling across one of
the spacious courtyards of the Waldzell Players' Village, he heard someone behind him calling
his name. The voice sounded very familiar, although he did not recognize it at once. When he
turned around he saw a tall young man with a trim beard rushing tempestuously toward him. It
was Plinio, and with a surge of affection and warm memories, Joseph greeted him heartily. They
arranged to meet that evening. Plinio, who had long ago finished his studies at the universities in
the outside world and was already a government official, had come to Waldzell on holiday for a
short guest course in the Glass Bead Game, as he had in fact done once before, several years
earlier.

The evening they spent together, however, proved an embarrassment to both friends.
Plinio was here as a guest student, a tolerated dilettante from outside; although he was pursuing
his course with great eagerness, it was nevertheless a course for outsiders and amateurs. The
distance between them was too great; he was facing a professional, an initiate whose very
delicacy and polite interest in his friend's enthusiasm for the Glass Bead Game inevitably made
him feel that he was not a colleague but a child playfully dabbling on the outer edges of a science
which the other understood to its very core. Knecht tried to turn the conversation away from the
Game by asking Plinio about his official functions and his life on the outside. And now Joseph
was the laggard and the child who asked innocent questions and was tactfully tutored. Plinio had
gone into law, was seeking political influence, and was about to become engaged to the daughter
of a party leader. He spoke a language that Joseph only half understood; many recurrent
expressions sounded empty to him, or seemed to have no content. At any rate he realized that
Plinio counted for something in his world, knew his way about in it, and had ambitious aims. But
the two worlds, which ten years ago both youths had each touched with tentative curiosity and a
measure of sympathy, had by now grown irreconcilably apart.

Joseph could appreciate the fact that this man of the world and politician had retained a
certain attachment to Castalia. This was, after all, the second time he was sacrificing a holiday to
the Glass Bead Game. But in the end, Joseph thought, it was pretty much the same as if he were
one day to pay a visit to Plinio's district and attend a few sessions of the court as a curious guest,
and have Plinio show him through a few factories or welfare institutions. Both were
disappointed. Knecht found his former friend coarse and superficial. Designori, for his part,
found his former schoolmate distinctly haughty in his exclusive esotericism and intellectuality;
he seemed to Plinio to have become a "pure intellect" altogether absorbed by himself and his
sport.

Both made an effort, however, and Designori had all sorts of tales to tell, about his
studies and examinations, about journeys to England and to the south, political meetings,
parliament. At one point, moreover, he said something that sounded like a threat or a warning.
"You will see," he said. "Soon there will be times of unrest, perhaps wars, in which case your
whole existence in Castalia might well come under attack."

Joseph did not take this too seriously. He merely asked: "And what about you, Plinio? In
that case would you be for or against Castalia?"

"Oh that," Plinio said with a forced smile. "It's not likely that I'd be asked my opinion.
But of course I favor the undisturbed continuance of Castalia; otherwise I wouldn't be here, you
know. Still and all, although your material requirements are so modest, Castalia costs the country
quite a little sum every year. "

"Yes," Joseph said, laughing, "it amounts, I am told, to about a tenth of what our country
used to spend annually for armaments during the Century of Wars."

They met several more times, and the closer the end of Plinio's course approached, the more
assiduous they became in courtesies toward each other. But it was a relief to both when the
two or three weeks were over and Plinio departed.

The Magister Ludi at that time was Thomas von der Trave, a famous, widely traveled, and
cosmopolitan man, gracious and obliging toward everyone who approached him, but severe
to the point of fanaticism in guarding the Game against contamination. He was a great worker,
something unsuspected by those who knew him only in his public role, dressed in his festive
robes to conduct the great Games, or receiving delegations from abroad. He was said to be a
cool, even icy rationalist, whose relationship to the arts was one of mere distant civility. Among
the young and ardent amateurs of the Glass Bead Game, rather deprecatory opinions of him
could be heard at times — misjudgments, for if he was not an enthusiast and in the great public
games tended to avoid touching on grand and exciting themes, the brilliant construction and
unequalled form of his games proved to the cognoscenti his total grasp of the subtlest problems
of the Game's world.

One day the Magister Ludi sent for Joseph Knecht. He received him in his home, in
everyday clothes, and asked whether he would care to come for half an hour every day at this
same time for the next few days. Knecht, who had never before had any private dealings with the
Master, was somewhat astonished.

For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received
from an organist — one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game
regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to
the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal
and discovered in the development of the style a curve that he had expressed both musically
and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had
examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking
congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again
some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the
fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who
could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of
Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric
drawings in several colors.

Knecht attacked the manuscript with eagerness. He himself, after all, had often pondered
such proposals, although he had never submitted any. Every active Glass Bead Game player
naturally dreams of a constant expansion of the fields of the Game until they include the entire
universe. Or rather, he constantly performs such expansions in his imagination and his private
Games, and cherishes the secret desire for the ones which seem to prove their viability to be
crowned by official acceptance. The true and ultimate finesse in the private Games of advanced
players consists, of course, in their developing such mastery over the expressive, nomenclatural,
and formative factors of the Game that they can inject individual and original ideas into any
given Game played with objective historical materials. A distinguished botanist once whimsically
expressed the idea in an aphorism: "The Glass Bead Game should admit of everything, even that
a single plant should chat in Latin with Linnaeus."

Knecht, then, helped the Magister analyze the suggestion. The half-hour passed swiftly.
He came punctually the next day, and so for two weeks came daily for a half-hour session with
the Magister Ludi. During the first few days it struck him that the Master was asking him to
work carefully and critically through altogether inferior memoranda, whose uselessness was
evident at first glance. He wondered that the Master had time for this sort of thing, and gradually
became aware that the purpose was not just to lighten the Master's work load. Rather, this
assignment, although necessary in itself, was giving the Master a chance to subject him, the
young adept, to an extremely courteous but stringent examination. What was taking place was
rather similar to the appearance of the Music Master in his boyhood; he suddenly became aware
of it now by the behavior of his associates, who treated him more shyly, reservedly, and some-
times with ironic respect. Something was in the wind; he sensed it; but now it was far less a
source of joy than it had been then.

After the last of these sessions the Magister Ludi said in his rather high, courteous voice
and in that carefully enunciated speech of his, but without the slightest solemnity: "Very well;
you need not come tomorrow. Our business is completed for the moment. But I shall soon be
having to trouble you again. Many thanks for your collaboration; it has been valuable to me.
Incidentally, in my opinion you ought to apply for your admission to the Order now. There will
be no difficulties; I have already informed the heads of the Order." As he rose he added: "One
word more, just by the way. Probably you too sometimes incline, as most good Glass Bead
Game players do in their youth, to use our Game as a kind of instrument for philosophizing. My
words alone will not cure you of that, but nevertheless I shall say them: Philosophizing should be
done only with legitimate tools, those of philosophy. Our Game is neither philosophy nor
religion; it is a discipline of its own, in character most akin to art. It is an art sui generis. One
makes greater strides if one holds to that view from the first than if one reaches it only after a
hundred failures. The philosopher Kant — he is little known today, but he was a formidable
thinker — once said that theological philosophizing was 'a magic lantern of chimeras.' We should
not make our Glass Bead Game into that."

Joseph was surprised. His excitement was so great that he almost failed to hear the last
cautionary remarks. It had flashed through his mind that this meant the end of his freedom, the
completion of his period of study, admission to the Order, and his imminent enrollment in the
ranks of the hierarchy. He expressed his thanks with a low bow, and went promptly to the
secretariat of the Order in Waldzell, where sure enough he found himself already inscribed on
the list of new nominees to the Order. Like all students at his level, he knew the rules of the
Order fairly well, and remembered that the ceremony of admission could be performed by every
member of the Order who held an official post in the higher ranks. He therefore requested that
this be done by the Music Master, obtained a pass and a short furlough, and next day set out for
Monteport, where his patron and friend was staying. He found the venerable old Master ailing,
but was welcomed with rejoicing.

"You have come just in time," the old man said. "Soon I would no longer be empowered to re-
ceive you into the Order as a younger brother. I am about to resign my office; my release has
already been granted."

The ceremony itself was simple. On the following day the Music Master invited two
brothers of the Order to be present as witnesses, as prescribed by the statutes. Previously, he had
given Knecht a paragraph from the rules as the subject of a meditation exercise. It was the
familiar passage: "If the high Authority appoints you to an office, know this: every step upward
on the ladder of offices is not a step into freedom but into bondage. The higher the office, the
tighter the bondage. The greater the power of the office, the stricter the service. The stronger the
personality, the less self-will."

The group then assembled in the Magister's music cell, the same in which Knecht had long
ago been introduced to the art of meditation. The Master called upon the novice, in honor of
the initiation, to play a chorale prelude by Bach. Then one of the witnesses read aloud the
abbreviated version of the rules of the Order, and the Music Master himself asked the ritual
questions and received his young friend's oath. He accorded Joseph another hour; they sat in the
garden and the Master advised him on how to identify himself with the rules and live by them.
"It is good," he said, "that at the moment I am departing you are stepping into the breach; it is as
if I had a son who will stand in my stead." And when he saw Joseph's sad look he added: "Come
now, don't be downcast. I'm not. I am very tired and looking forward to the leisure I mean to
enjoy, and which you will share with me frequently, I hope. And next time we meet, use the
familiar pronoun of address to me. I could not offer that as long as I held office." He dismissed
him with that winning smile which Joseph had now known for twenty years.

Knecht returned quickly to Waldzell, for he had been given only three days leave. He was
barely back when the Magister Ludi sent for him, greeted him affably as one colleague to
another, and congratulated him on his admission to the Order. "All that is now lacking to make
us completely colleagues and associates," he continued, "is your assignment to a definite place in
our organization."

Joseph was somewhat taken aback. So this would be the end of his freedom.

"Oh," he said timidly, "I hope I can prove useful in some modest spot somewhere. But to
be candid with you, I had been hoping I would be able to continue studying freely for a while
longer."

The Magister looked straight into his eyes with a faintly ironic smile. "You say 'a while,'
but how long is that?"

Knecht gave an embarrassed laugh. "I really don't know."

"So I thought," the Master said. "You are still speaking the language of students and think-
ing in student terms, Joseph Knecht. That is quite all right now, but soon it will no longer be
all right, for we need you. Besides, you know that later on, even in the highest offices of our
Order, you can obtain leaves for purposes of study, if you can persuade the authorities of the
value of these studies. My predecessor and teacher, for example, while he was still Magister Ludi
and an old man, requested and received a full year's furlough for studies in the London Archives.
But he received his furlough not for 'a while,' but for a specific number of months, weeks, and
days. Henceforth you will have to count on that. And now I have a proposal to make to you. We
need a reliable man who is as yet unknown outside our circle for a special mission."

The assignment was the following. The Benedictine monastery of Mariafels, one of the
oldest centers of learning in the country, which maintained friendly relations with Castalia and in
particular had favored the Glass Bead Game for decades, had asked him to send a young teacher
for a prolonged stay, to give introductory courses in the Game and also to stimulate the few
advanced players in the monastery. The Magister's choice had fallen upon Joseph Knecht. That
was why he had been so discreetly tested; that was why his entry into the Order had been
accelerated.



　　　　　　　　　　　　　FOUR

　　　　　　　　TWO ORDERS



In a GOOD many respects Joseph Knecht's situation was once again similar to that in his
Latin school days after the Music Master's visit. Joseph himself would scarcely have imagined
that the appointment to Mariafels represented a special distinction and a large first step on the
ladder of the hierarchy, but he was after all a good deal wiser about such matters nowadays and
could plainly read the significance of his summons in the attitude and conduct of his fellow
students. Of course he had belonged for some time to the innermost circle within the elite of the
Glass Bead Game players, but now the unusual assignment marked him to all and sundry as a
young man whom the superiors had their eye on and whom they intended to employ. His
associates and ambitious fellow players did not exactly withdraw or become unfriendly — the
members of this highly aristocratic group were far too well-mannered for that — but an aloofness
nevertheless arose. Yesterday's friend might well be tomorrow's superior, and this circle
registered and expressed such gradations and differentiations by the most delicate shades of
behavior.

One exception was Fritz Tegularius, whom we may well call, next to Ferromonte, Joseph
Knecht's closest friend throughout his life. Tegularius, destined by his gifts for the highest
achievements but severely hampered by certain deficiencies of health, balance, and self-
confidence, was the same age as Knecht at the time of Knecht's admission to the Order — that is,
about thirty-four — and had first met him some ten years earlier in a Glass Bead Game course. At
the time Knecht had sensed how strong an attraction he exerted upon this quiet and rather
melancholy youth. With that psychological instinct which he possessed even then, although
without precisely knowing it, he likewise grasped the essence of this love on the part of
Tegularius. It was friendship ready for unconditional devotion, a respect capable of the utmost
subordination. It was imbued with an almost religious fervor, but overshadowed and held in
bounds by an aristocratic reserve and a foreboding of inner tragedy. In the beginning, still shaken
and oversensitive, not to say suspicious, as a result of the Designori episode, Knecht had held
Tegularius at a distance by consistent sternness, although he too felt drawn to this interesting and
unusual schoolfellow. For a characterization of Tegularius we may use a page from Knecht's
confidential memoranda which, years later, he regularly drew up for the exclusive use of the
highest authorities. It reads:

"Tegularius. Personal friend of the writer. Recipient of several honors at school in
Keuperheim. Good classical philologist, strong interest in philosophy, worked on Leibniz,
Bolzano, subsequently Plato. The most brilliant and gifted Glass Bead Game player I know. He
would be predestined for Magister Ludi were it not that his character, together with his frail
health, make him completely unsuited for that position. T. should never be appointed to an
outstanding, representative, or organizational position; that would be a misfortune for him and
for the office. His deficiency takes physical form in states of low vitality, periods of insomnia
and nervous aches, psychologically in spells of melancholy, a hunger for solitude, fear of duties
and responsibilities, and probably also in thoughts of suicide. Dangerous though his situation is,
by the aid of meditation and great self-discipline he keeps himself going so courageously that
most of his acquaintances have no idea of how severely he suffers and are aware only of his
great shyness and taciturnity. But although T. unfortunately is not fitted for higher posts, he is
nevertheless a jewel in the Vicus Lusorum, an altogether irreplaceable treasure. He has mastered
the technique of our game like a great musician his instrument; he instinctively finds the most
delicate nuances, and is also an exceptional instructor. In the advanced and highest review
courses — for my part he would be wasted in the lower ones — I could scarcely manage without
him any longer. The way he analyzes the specimen Games of boys without ever discouraging
them, the way he detects their tricks, infallibly recognizes and exposes everything imitative or
purely decorative, the way he finds the sources of error in a Game that has started well but then
gone astray, and lays these errors bare like flawlessly prepared anatomical specimens — is al-
together unique. It is this sharp and incorruptible talent for analysis and correction that assures
him the respect of students and colleagues, which otherwise might have been jeopardized by his
unstable demeanor and shyness.

"I should like to cite an example to illustrate T.'s brilliance as a Glass Bead Game player.
During the early days of my friendship with him, when both of us were already finding little
more to learn by way of technique in our courses, he once — it was a moment of unusual trust —
allowed me to look at several games he had composed. I saw at a glance that they were
brilliantly devised and somehow novel and original in style, asked to borrow the sketches for
study, and discovered that these Game compositions were true literary productions, so amazing
and singular that I feel I should speak of them here. These Games were little dramas, in structure
almost pure monologues, reflecting the imperiled but brilliant life of the author's mind like a
perfect self-portrait. The various themes and groups of themes on which the Games were based,
and their sequences and confrontations, were brilliantly conceived, dialectically orchestrated and
counterpoised. But beyond that, the synthesis and harmonization of the opposing voices was not
carried to the ultimate conclusion in the usual classical manner; rather, this harmonization
underwent a whole series of refractions, of splintering into overtones, and paused each time, as if
wearied and despairing, just on the point of dissolution, finally fading out in questioning and
doubt. As a result, those Games possessed a stirring chromatics, of a kind never before ventured,
as far as I know. Moreover, the Games as a whole expressed a tragic doubt and renunciation; they
became figurative statements of the dubiousness of all intellectual endeavor. At the same time,
in their intellectual structure as well as in their calligraphic technique and perfection, they
were so extraordinarily beautiful that they brought tears to one's eyes. Each of these Games
moved with such gravity and sincerity toward solution, only at the last so nobly to forgo the
attempt at solution, that it was like a perfect elegy upon the transitoriness inherent in all
beautiful things and the ultimate dubiety immanent in all soaring flights of the intellect.

"Item: I would recommend Tegularius, if he should outlive me or my term in office, as an
extremely fine, precious, but imperiled treasure. He should be granted maximum freedom; he
should be consulted on all important questions concerning the Game. But students should never
be placed in his sole guidance."

In the course of the years this remarkable man had become Knecht's true friend. He admired
Knecht's capacity for leadership as well as his mind, and showed a touching devotion toward
him. In fact, much of what we know about Knecht has been handed down by Tegularius. In the
innermost circle of younger Glass Bead Game players he was perhaps the only one who did not
envy his friend for the important assignment he had received, and the only one for whom
Knecht's absence for an indefinite time meant an almost unbearable anguish and sense of loss.

Joseph himself rejoiced in the new state of affairs as soon as he recovered from the shock
of suddenly being shorn of his beloved freedom. He felt eagerness to travel, pleasure in activity,
and curiosity about the alien world to which he was being sent. Incidentally, he was not allowed
to depart for Mariafels without preparation; first he was assigned to the "Police" for three weeks.
That was the students' name for the small department within the Board of Educators which might
be called its Political Department or even its Foreign Ministry, were these not somewhat grand-
iose names for so small an affair. There he received instruction in the rules of conduct for
brothers of the Order during their stays in the outside world. Dubois, the head of this office,
personally devoted an hour to him nearly every day. This conscientious man seemed worried that
an altogether untried young man without the faintest knowledge of the world should be sent to
such a foreign post. He made no attempt to conceal his disapproval of the Magister Ludi's
decision, and took extra pains to inform this new member of the Order on the facts of life in the
outside world and the means for effectively combatting its perils. His sincere paternal solicitude
fortunately was matched by Joseph's willingness to be instructed. The result was that during
those hours of introduction into the rules of intercourse with the world, the teacher conceived
a real affection for Joseph Knecht, and finally felt able to dismiss him reassured and fully
confident that the young man would be able to carry out his mission successfully. Dubois even
tried, more out of personal good will than the demands of politics, to give Joseph a kind of
additional assignment on his own behalf. As one of Castalia's few "politicians," Dubois was one
of that tiny group of officials whose thoughts and studies were largely devoted to sustaining the
legal and economic continuance of Castalia, to regulating its relationship to the outside world
and the problems that arose from its dependence on the world. The great majority of Castalians,
the officials no less than the scholars and students, lived in their Pedagogic Province and their
Order as if these constituted a stable, eternal, inevitable world. They knew, of course, that it had
not always existed, that it had come into being slowly and amid bitter struggles in times of cruel
distress; they knew it had originated at the end of the Age of Wars out of a double source: the
heroically ascetic efforts of scholars, artists, and thinkers who had come to their senses, and
the profound craving of the exhausted, bled, and betrayed peoples for order, normality, reason,
lawfulness, and moderation. Castalians knew this, and understood the function of all the Orders
and Pedagogic Provinces throughout the world: to abstain from government and competition and
instead to assure stability for the spiritual foundations of moderation and law everywhere. But
that the present order of things was not to be taken for granted, that it presupposed a certain
harmony between the world and the guardians of culture, that this harmony could always be dis-
rupted, and that world history taken as a whole by no means furthered what was desirable, ratio-
nal, and beautiful in the life of man, but at best only occasionally tolerated it as an exception
— all this they did not realize. Except for those few political thinkers like Dubois, almost all
Castalians were unaware of the secret complex of problems underlying the existence of Castalia.
Once Knecht won the confidence of Dubois, he was given a glimpse of the political foundations
of Castalia. At first the subject struck him as rather repellent and uninteresting — which, indeed,
was the reaction of most members of the Order. But then he recalled Plinio Designori's remark
about possible dangers to Castalia. Along with that recollection there flooded back into his mind
the whole bitter aftertaste of his youthful debates with Plinio, seemingly long since settled and
forgotten. Now these suddenly seemed to him of the highest importance and, moreover, a stage
on the road to his "awakening."

At the end of their last talk Dubois said to him: "I think I can let you go now. You are to
adhere strictly to the assignment his honor the Magister Ludi has given you, and no less strictly
to the rules of conduct we have taught you here. It was a pleasure to me to be able to help you.
You will see that the three weeks we have kept you were not time lost. And if you should ever
want to recompense me for my contribution to your education, I can suggest a way. You will be
entering a Benedictine abbey, and if you stay there a while and commend yourself to the Fathers,
you will probably hear political conversations and sense political currents among the venerable
Fathers and their guests. If you would occasionally inform me about such matters, I would be
grateful. Please understand me aright: you are certainly not to regard yourself as a kind of spy
or in any way misuse confidences. You are not to pass along anything that goes against your
conscience. I guarantee that we will use any information we may receive only in the interest of
our Order and Castalia. We are not real politicians and have no power at all, but we too are
dependent on the world, which either needs or tolerates us. Circumstances may arise in which we
might profit by knowing that a statesman is making a retreat in a monastery, or that the Pope is
said to be ill, or that new candidates have been added to the list of future cardinals. We are not
dependent on your information — we have quite a variety of sources — but one little source more
can do no harm. Go now, you need not say yes or no to this matter. For the present all that is
needed is for you to comport yourself well in your official assignment and do us honor among
the spiritual Fathers. Bon voyage."

In the Book of Changes, which Knecht consulted by means of the yarrow stalk ritual
before he set out, he counted out the hexagram Lu, which signifies "The Wanderer," and the
augury: "Success through smallness. Persistence is good fortune to the wanderer." He found a
six for the second place, which yielded the interpretation:

　　　　　The wanderer comes to the inn.
　　　　　He has his possessions with him.
　　　　　He receives the persistent attentions of a
　　　　　　 young servant.

Knecht's leave-taking went off cheerfully, except that his last talk with Tegularius proved to
be a hard test of both their characters. Fritz controlled himself by extreme effort and appeared
absolutely frozen in the coolness he forced himself to display. For him, the best he had was
departing with his friend. Knecht's nature did not permit so passionate and above all so exclu-
sive an attachment to a friend. If need be, he could get along without one and could direct his
affections easily toward new objects and people. This parting was not a painful loss for him;
but he knew his friend well enough to know what a shock and trial it meant for him, and he was
concerned. He had given much thought to the nature of this friendship, and had once spoken
about it with the Music Master. To a certain extent he had learned to objectify his own exper-
ience and feelings, and to regard them critically. In so doing he had become aware that it was
not really, or at any rate not only, his friend's great talent that attracted him to Tegularius.
Rather, it was the association of this talent with such serious defects, such great fragility. And
he realized that the single-mindedness of the love Tegularius offered him had not only its beauti-
ful aspect, but also a dangerous attraction, for it tempted him to display his power over one
weaker in strength though not in love. Therefore in this relationship he had made restraint and
self-discipline his duty to the last. Fond though he was of Tegularius, the friendship would not
have acquired so deep a meaning for him if it had not taught him something about the dominion he
had over others weaker and less secure than himself. He learned that this power to influence
others was part and parcel of the educator's gift, and that it concealed dangers and imposed
responsibility. Tegularius, after all, was only one of many. In the eyes of quite a few others
Knecht read silent courtship.

At the same time, during the past year he had become far more conscious of the highly
charged atmosphere in which he lived in the Glass Bead Game village. For there he was part of
an officially nonexistent but very sharply defined circle, or class, the finest elite among the
candidates and tutors of the Glass Bead Game. Now and then one or another of that group would
be called upon to serve in an auxiliary capacity under the Magister or Archivist, or to help
teach one of the Game courses; but they were never assigned to the lower or middle level of
officialdom or the teaching corps. They provided the reserve for filling vacancies in leading
posts. They knew one another thoroughly; they had almost no illusions about talents, characters,
and achievements. And precisely because among these initiates and aspirants for the highest
dignities each one was pre-eminent, each of the very first rank in performance, knowledge, and
academic record — precisely for that reason those traits and nuances of character which
predestined a candidate for leadership and success inevitably counted for a great deal and were
closely observed. A dash more or less of graciousness, of suasion with younger men or with the
authorities, of amiability, was of great importance in this group and could give its possessor a
definitive edge over his rivals. Fritz Tegularius plainly belonged to this circle merely as an
outsider; he was tolerated as a guest but kept at the periphery because he had no gift for rule.
Just as plainly Knecht belonged to the innermost circle. What appealed to the young and made them
his admirers was his wholesome vigor and still youthful charm which appeared to be resistant to
passions, incorruptible and then again boyishly irresponsible — a kind of innocence, that is. And
what commended him to his superiors was the reverse side of this innocence: his freedom from
ambition and craving for success.

Of late, the effects of his personality had begun to dawn upon the young man. He became a-
ware of his attraction for those below him, and gradually, belatedly, of how he affected those
above him. And when he looked back from his new standpoint of awareness to his boyhood, he
found both lines running through his life and shaping it. Classmates and younger boys had
always courted him; superiors had taken benevolent note of him. There had been exceptions,
such as Headmaster Zbinden; but on the other hand he had been recipient of such distinctions
as the patronage of the Music Master, and latterly of Dubois and the Magister Ludi. It was all
perfectly plain, in spite of which Knecht had never been willing to see it and accept it in its
entirety. Obviously his fate was to enter the elite everywhere, to find admiring friends and high-
ly placed patrons. It happened of its own accord, without his trying. Obviously he would not be
allowed to settle down in the shadows at the base of the hierarchy; he must move steadily toward
its apex, approach the bright light at the top. He would not be a subordinate or an independent
scholar; he would be a master. That he grasped this later than others in a similar position gave
him that indescribable extra magic, that note of innocence.

But why was it that he realized it so late, and so reluctantly? Because he had not sought it
at all, and did not want it. He had no need to dominate, took no pleasure in commanding; he
desired the contemplative far more than the active life, and would have been content to spend
many years more, if not his whole life, as an obscure student, an inquiring and reverent pilgrim
through the sanctuaries of the past, the cathedrals of music, the gardens and forests of
mythology, languages and ideas. Now that he saw himself being pushed inexorably into the vita
activa he was more than ever aware of the tensions of the aspirations, the rivalries, the am-
bitions among those around him. He felt his innocence threatened and no longer tenable. Now, he
realized, he must desire and affirm the position that was being thrust upon him; otherwise he
would be haunted by a feeling of imprisonment and nostalgia for the freedom of the past ten
years. And since he was not as yet altogether ready for that affirmation, he felt his temporary
departure from Waldzell and the Province, his journey out into the world, as a great relief and
release.


The monastery of Mariafels, through the many centuries of its existence, had shared in
the making and the suffering of the history of the West. It had experienced periods of flowering
and decline, had passed through rebirths and new nadirs, and had been at various times and in
assorted fields famous and brilliant. Once a center of Scholastic learning and the art of
disputation, still possessing an enormous library of medieval theology, it had risen to new glory
after periods of slackness and sluggishness. It then became famous for its music, its much-
praised choir, and the Masses and oratorios composed and performed by the Fathers. From those
days it still retained a fine musical tradition, half a dozen nut-brown chests full of music
manuscripts, and the finest organ in the country. Then the monastery had entered a political era,
which had likewise left behind a tradition and a certain skill. In times of war and barbarization
Mariafels had several times become a little island of rationality where the better minds among
the opposed parties cautiously sought each other out and groped their way toward reconciliation.
And once — that was the last high point in its history — Mariafels had been the birthplace of a
peace treaty which for a while met the longings of the exhausted nations. Afterward, when a new
age began and Castalia was founded, the monastery took an attitude of wait-and-see, was in fact
rather hostile, presumably on instructions from Rome. A request from the Board of Educators to
grant hospitality to a scholar who wished to work for a time in the monastery's Scholastic library
was politely turned down, as was an invitation to send a representative to a conference of
musicologists. Intercourse between Castalia and the monastery had first begun in the time of
Abbot Pius, who in his latter years became keenly interested in the Glass Bead Game. Ever since
then a friendly though not very lively relationship had developed. Books were exchanged,
reciprocal hospitality granted. Knecht's patron, the Music Master, had spent a few weeks in
Mariafels during his younger years, copying music manuscripts and playing the famous organ.
Knecht knew of this, and rejoiced at the prospect of staying in a place of which his venerated
Master had occasionally spoken with pleasure.

The respect and politeness with which he was received went so far beyond his expectations that
he felt rather embarrassed. This was, after all, the first time that Castalia had offered the
monastery a Glass Bead Game player of high distinction for an indefinite period. Joseph had
learned from Dubois that he was not to regard himself as an individual, especially during the
early period of his stay, but solely as the representative of Castalia, and that he was to
accept and respond both to courtesies and possible aloofness solely as an ambassador. That
attitude helped him through his initial constraint.

He likewise soon overcame the feelings of strangeness, anxiety, and mild excitability
which troubled his first few nights and kept him from sleeping. And since Abbot Gervasius
displayed a good-natured and merry benevolence toward him, he quickly came to feel at ease in
his new environment. The freshness and vigor of the landscape delighted him. The monastery
was situated in rough, mountainous country, full of abrupt cliffs and pockets of rich pasture
where handsome cattle grazed. He savored with deep pleasure the massiveness and size of the
ancient buildings, in which the history of many centuries could be read. He enjoyed the beauty
and simple comfort of his apartment, two rooms on the top floor of the guest wing. For recrea-
tion he went on exploratory walks through the fine little city-state with its two churches,
cloisters, archives, library, Abbot's apartment, and courtyards, with its extensive barns filled
with thrifty livestock, its gurgling fountains, gigantic vaulted wine and fruit cellars, its two refect-
ories, the famous chapter house, the well-tended gardens and the workshops of the lay brothers:
cooper, cobbler, tailor, smith, and so on, all forming a small village around the largest courtyard.
He was granted entry to the library; the organist showed him the great organ and allowed him to
play on it; and he was strongly attracted to the chests in which an impressive number of
unpublished and to some extent quite unknown music manuscripts of earlier ages awaited study.

The monks did not seem to be terribly impatient for him to begin his official functions.
Not only days but weeks passed before anyone seriously brought up the real purpose of his
presence there. From his first day, it was true, some of the Fathers, and the Abbot himself in
particular, had been eager to chat with Joseph about the Glass Bead Game. But no one said
anything about instruction or any other systematic work with the Game. In other respects, too,
Knecht felt that the manners, style of life, and general tone of intercourse among the monks
was couched in a tempo hitherto unknown to him. There was a kind of venerable slowness, a
leisurely and benign patience in which all these Fathers seemed to share, including those whose
temperaments seemed rather more active. It was the spirit of their Order, the millennial pace of
an age-old, privileged community whose orderly existence had survived hundreds of vicissitudes.
They all shared it, as every bee shares the fate of its hive, sleeps its sleep, suffers its
sufferings, trembles with its trembling. This Benedictine temper seemed at first glance less
intellectual, less supple and acute, less active than the style of life in Castalia, but on the
other hand calmer, less malleable, older, more resistant to tribulation. The spirit and mentality
of this place had long ago achieved a harmony with nature.

With curiosity and intense interest, and with great admiration as well, Knecht submitted to the
mood of life in this monastery, which at a time before Castalia existed had been almost the
same as it was now, and even then fifteen hundred years old, and which was so congenial to the
contemplative side of his nature. He was an honored guest, honored far beyond his expectations
and deserts; but he felt distinctly that these courtesies were a matter of form and custom and not
specially addressed to him as a person, nor to the spirit of Castalia or of the Glass Bead Game.
Rather, the Benedictines were displaying the majestic politeness of an ancient power to a younger
one. He had been only partly prepared for this implicit superiority, and after a while, for all
that his life in Mariafels was proving so agreeable, he began to feel so insecure that he asked
his authorities for more precise instructions on how to conduct himself. The Magister Ludi in
person wrote him a few lines: "Don't worry about taking all the time you need for your study of
the life there. Profit by your days, learn, try to make yourself well liked and useful, insofar as
you find your hosts receptive, but do not obtrude yourself, and never seem more impatient, never
seem to be under more pressure than they. Even if they should go on treating you for an entire
year as if each day were your first as a guest in their house, enter calmly into the spirit of it and
behave as if two or even ten years more do not matter to you. Take it as a test in the practice of
patience. Meditate carefully. If time hangs heavy on your hands, set aside a few hours every day,
no more than four, for some regular work, study, or the copying of manuscripts, say. But avoid
giving the impression of diligence; be at the disposal of everyone who wishes to chat with you."

Knecht followed this advice, and soon began feeling more relaxed. Hitherto he had been
thinking too much of his assignment to act as instructor to amateur Glass Bead Game players —
the ostensible reason for his mission here — whereas the Fathers of the monastery were treating
him rather as the envoy of a friendly power who must be kept in good humor. And when at last
Abbot Gervasius recollected the assignment, and brought him together with several of the monks
who had already had an introduction to the art of the Glass Bead Game and hoped he would give
them a more advanced course, it turned out to his astonishment and his intense disappointment
that the noble Game was cultivated in a most superficial and amateurish way at this hospitable
place. He would evidently have to content himself with a very modest level of knowledge of the
Game. Slowly, though, he came to realize that he had not really been sent here for the sake of
lifting the standards of the Glass Bead Game in the monastery. The assignment of coaching the
few Fathers moderately devoted to the Game and equipping them with a modest degree of skill
was easy, much too easy. Any other adept at the Game, even if he were still far from belonging
to the elite, would have been equal to the task. Instruction, then, could not be the real purpose
of his mission. He began to realize that he had probably been sent here less to teach than to
learn.

However, just as he thought he had grasped this, his authority in the monastery, and conse-
quently his self-assurance, was unexpectedly reinforced. This came in the nick of time, for
in spite of all the charms of being a guest there, he had already at times begun to feel his
stay as something like a punitive transfer. One day, however, in a conversation with the Abbot
he inadvertently made some allusion to the Chinese I Ching. The Abbot showed marked interest,
asked a few questions, and could not disguise his delight when he found his guest so unexpect-
edly versed in Chinese and the Book of Changes. The Abbot, too, was fond of the I Ching. He
knew no Chinese, and his knowledge of the book of oracles and other Chinese mysteries was lim-
ited — in all their scholarly interests the present inmates of the monastery seemed content
with a harmless smattering. Nevertheless, this intelligent man, who was so much more experi-
enced and worldly-wise than his guest, obviously had a real feeling for the spirit of ancient
Chinese attitudes toward politics and life. A conversation of unusual liveliness ensued. For
the first time real warmth was injected into the prevailing tone of remote courtesy between
host and guest. The consequence was that Knecht was asked to give the Abbot instruction in
the I Ching twice a week.

While his relationship to his host, the Abbot, thus increased in liveliness and meaning, while
his friendly fellowship with the organist throve and the small ecclesiastical state in which
he lived gradually became familiar territory to him, the promise of the oracle he had consulted
before leaving Castalia also neared fulfillment. As the wanderer who carried his possessions with
him, he had been promised not only the shelter of an inn but also "the persistent attentions of a
young servant." The wanderer felt justified in taking the consummation of this promise as a good
sign, a sign that he in truth had "his possessions with him." In other words, far away from the
schools, teachers, friends, patrons, and helpers, far from the nourishing and salutary home at-
mosphere of Castalia, he carried within himself the spirit and the energies of the Province, and
with their aid he was moving toward an active and useful life.

The foretold "young servant," as it turned out, appeared in the shape of a seminary pupil
named Anton. Although this young man subsequently played no part in Joseph Knecht's life, in
Joseph's peculiarly divided mood during his sojourn in the monastery the boy seemed a
harbinger of new and greater things. Anton was a close-mouthed youngster, but temperamental
and talented looking, and almost ready for admission into the community of monks. Joseph's
path often crossed his, whereas he scarcely knew any of the other seminary pupils, who were
confined in a wing by themselves, where guests were not admitted. In fact it was obvious that
they were being kept from contact with him. Seminary pupils were not permitted to participate
in the Game course.

Anton worked as a helper in the library several times a week. Here it was that Knecht met
him, and occasionally had a few words with him. As time went on, it became evident to Knecht
that this young man with the intense eyes under heavy black brows was devoted to him with that
enthusiasm and readiness to serve so typical of the boyish adoration he had encountered so often
by now. Although every time it happened he felt a desire to fend it off, he had long ago come to
recognize it as a vital element in the life of the Castalian Order. But in the monastery he decided
to be doubly withdrawn; he felt it would be a violation of hospitality to exert any sway over this
boy who was still subject to the discipline of religious education. Moreover, he was well aware
that strict chastity was the commandment here, and this, it seemed to him, could make a boyish
infatuation even more dangerous. In any case, he must avoid any chance of giving offense, and
he governed himself accordingly.

In the library, the one place where he habitually met Anton, he also made the acquaintance of
a man he had at first almost failed to notice, so modest was his appearance. In time, however,
he was to know him very well indeed, and to love him for the rest of his life with the kind of
grateful reverence he felt, otherwise, only toward the now retired Music Master. The man was
Father Jacobus, perhaps the most eminent historian of the Benedictine Order. He was at that
time about sixty, a spare, elderly man with a sparrow hawk's head on a long, sinewy neck.
Seen from the front, his face had something dull and lifeless about it, since he was chary of
gazing outward; but his profile, with the boldly curved line of the forehead, the deep furrow
above the sharp bridge of his hooked nose, and the rather short but attractively shaped chin,
suggested a definite and original personality.

This quiet old man — who, incidentally, on closer acquaintance could be extremely vivacious
— had a table of his own in a small room off the main hall of the library. Though the mon-
astery possessed such priceless books, he seemed to be the only really serious working schol-
ar in the place. It was, by the way, the novice Anton who by chance called Joseph Knecht's
attention to Father Jacobus. Knecht had noticed that the room in which the scholar had his table
was regarded almost as a private domain. The few users of the library entered it only if they had
to, and then moved softly and respectfully on tiptoe, although the Father bent over his books did
not appear to be easily disturbed. Knecht, of course, quickly imitated this circumspection, and
thereby remained at a remove from the industrious old man.

One day, however, when Anton had brought Father Jacobus some books, Knecht noticed how the
young man lingered a moment at the open door of the study, looking back at the scholar
already absorbed in his work again. There was adoration in Anton's face, an expression of
admiration and reverence mingled with those emotions of affectionate consideration and
helpfulness that well-bred youth sometimes manifests toward the paltriness and fragility of age.
Knecht's first reaction was delight; the sight was pleasing in itself, as well as evidence that
Anton could so look up to older men without any trace of physical feeling. A rather sarcastic
thought followed immediately, a thought Joseph felt almost ashamed of: how poor the state of
scholarship must be in this institution that the only seriously active scholar in the place was
stared at as if he were a fabulous beast. Nevertheless, Anton's look of reverent admiration for
the old man opened Knecht's eyes. He became aware of the learned Father's existence. He himself
took to throwing a glance now and then at the man, discovered his Roman profile, and gradually
found out one thing and another about Father Jacobus which seemed to suggest a most extraor-
dinary mind and character. Knecht had already learned that he was a historian and regarded
as the foremost authority on the history of the Benedictine Order.

One day the Father spoke to him. His manner of speech had none of the broad, deliberately
benevolent, deliberately good-natured, somewhat avuncular tone which seemed to be the style
of the monastery. Speaking in a low and almost timorous voice, but placing his stresses with
a wonderful precision, he invited Joseph to visit him in his room after vespers. "You will
find in me," he said, "neither a specialist on the history of Castalia nor a Glass Bead Game
player. But since, as it now seems, our two so different Orders are forming ever-closer ties
of friendship, I should not wish to exclude myself, and would be happy to take personal
advantage now and then of your presence among us."

He spoke with utter seriousness, but his low voice and shrewd old face conferred upon
his all-too-polite phrases that wonderful note of equivocation, ranging through the whole
compass from earnestness to irony, from deference to faint mockery, from passionate engage-
ment to playfulness, such as may be sensed when two holy men or two princes of the Church
greet each other with endless bows in a game of mutual courtesies and trial of patience.
This blending of superiority and mockery, of wisdom and obstinate ceremonial, was deeply
familiar to Joseph Knecht from his studies of Chinese language and life. He found it marve-
lously refreshing, and realized that it was some time since he had last heard this tone —
which, among others, the Glass Bead Game Master Thomas commanded with consummate skill.
With gratitude and pleasure, Joseph accepted the invitation.

That evening he called at the Father's rather isolated apartment at the end of a quiet side-
wing of the monastery. As he stood in the corridor, wondering which door to knock at, he heard
piano music, to his considerable surprise. It was a sonata by Purcell, played unpretentiously
and without virtuosity, but cleanly and in impeccable tempo. The pure music sounded through the
door; its heartfelt gaiety and sweet triads reminded him of the days in Waldzell when he had
practiced pieces of this sort on various instruments with his friend Ferromonte. He waited, list-
ening with deep enjoyment, for the end of the sonata. In the still, twilit corridor it sounded so
lonely and unworldly, and so brave and innocent also, both childlike and superior, as all good
music must in the midst of the unredeemed muteness of the world.

He knocked at the door. Father Jacobus called, "Come in," and received him with his unassuming
dignity. Two candles were still burning by the small piano. "Yes," Father Jacobus said in answer
to Knecht's question, "I play for a half-hour or even an hour every night. I usually call a
halt to my day's work when darkness falls and would rather not read or write during the hours
before sleep."

They talked about music, about Purcell, Handel, the ancient musical tradition among the Bene-
dictines — of all the Catholic Orders the one most devoted to the arts. Knecht expressed a
desire to know something of the history of the Order. The conversation grew lively and touched
on a hundred questions. The old monk's historical knowledge seemed to be truly astounding, but
he frankly admitted that the history of Castalia, of the Castalian idea and Order, had not
interested him. He had scarcely studied it, he said, and did not conceal his critical attitude
toward this Castalia whose "Order" he regarded as an imitation of the Christian models, and
fundamentally a blasphemous imitation since the Castalian Order had no religion, no God, and
no Church as its basis. Knecht listened respectfully, but pointed out that other than Benedict-
ine and Roman Catholic views of religion, God and the Church were possible, and moreover had
existed, and that it would not do to deny the purity of their intentions nor their profound
influence on the life of the mind.

"Quite so," Jacobus said. "No doubt you are thinking of the Protestants, among others. They
were unable to preserve religion and the Church, but at times they displayed a great deal of
courage and produced some exemplary men. I spent some years studying the various attempts at
reconciliation among the hostile Christian denominations and churches, especially those of the
period around 1700, when we find such people as the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz and
that eccentric Count Zinsendorf endeavoring to reunite the inimical brothers. Altogether, the
eighteenth century, hasty and shallow though it often seems in its judgments, has such a rich
and many-faceted intellectual history. The Protestants of that period strike me as particularly
interesting. There was one man I discovered, a philologist, teacher, and educator of great sta-
ture — a Swabian Pietist, by the way — whose moral influence can be clearly traced for two hun-
dred years after his death. But that is another subject. Let us return to the question of the
legitimacy and historical mission of real Orders. . ."

"Oh no," Joseph Knecht broke in. "Please say more about this teacher you have just men-
tioned. I almost think I can guess who he is."

"Guess."

"I thought at first of Francke of Halle, but since you say he was a Swabian I can think of
none other than Johann Albrecht Bengel."

Jacobus laughed. An expression of pleasure transfigured his face. "You surprise me, my friend,"
he exclaimed. "It was indeed Bengel I had in mind. How do you happen to know of him? Or is it
normal in your astonishing Province that people know such abstruse and forgotten things and
names? I would vouch that if you were to ask all the Fathers, teachers, and pupils in our
monastery, and those of the last few generations as well, not one would know this name."

"In Castalia, too, few would know it, perhaps no one besides myself and two of my friends.
I once engaged in studies of eighteenth-century Pietism for private reasons, and as it hap-
pened I was much impressed by several Swabian theologians — chief among them Bengel. At the
time he seemed to me the ideal teacher and guide for youth. I was so taken with the man that
I even had a photo made of his portrait in an old book, and kept it above my desk."

Father Jacobus continued to chuckle. "Our meeting is certainly taking place under unusual
auspices," he said. "It is remarkable enough that you and I should both have come upon this
forgotten man in the course of our studies. Perhaps it is even more remarkable that this
Swabian Protestant should have been able to influence both a Benedictine monk and a Castalian
Glass Bead Game player. Incidentally, I imagine that your Glass Bead Game is an art requiring
a great deal of imagination, and wonder that so stringently sober a man as Bengel should have
attracted you."

Knecht, too, chuckled with amusement. "Well," he said, "if you recall that Bengel devoted
years of study to the Revelation of St. John, and what sort of system he devised for inter-
preting its prophecies, you will have to admit that our friend could be the very opposite of
sober."

"That is true," Father Jacobus admitted gaily. "And how do you explain such contradictions?"

"If you will permit me a joke, I would say that what Bengel lacked, and unconsciously long-
ed for, was the Glass Bead Game. You see, I consider him among the secret forerunners and
ancestors of our Game."

Cautiously, once again entirely in earnest, Jacobus countered: "It strikes me as rather bold
to annex Bengel, of all people, for your pedigree. How do you justify it?"

"It was only a joke, but a ioke that can be defended. While he was still quite young,
before he became engrossed in his great work on the Bible, Bengel once told friends of a
cherished plan of his. He hoped, he said, to arrange and sum up all the knowledge of his time,
symmetrically and synoptically, around a central idea. That is precisely what the Glass Bead
Game does."

"After all, the whole eighteenth century toyed with the encyclopedic idea," Father
Jacobus protested.

"So it did," Joseph agreed. "But what Bengel meant was not just a juxtaposition of the fields
of knowledge and research, but an interrelationship, an organic denominator. And that is one
of the basic ideas of the Glass Bead Game. In fact, I would go further in my claims: if Ben-
gel had possessed a system similar to that offered by our Game, he probably would have been
spared all the misguided effort involved in his calculation of the prophetic numbers and his
annunciation of the Antichrist and the Millennial Kingdom. Bengel did not quite find what he
longed for: the way to channel all his various talents toward a single goal. Instead, his
mathematical gifts in association with his philological bent produced that weird blend of
pedantry and wild imagination, the 'order of the ages,' which occupied him for so many years."

"It is fortunate you are not a historian," Jacobus commented. "You tend to let your own
imagination run away with you. But I understand what you mean. I am myself a pedant only in
my own discipline."

It was a fruitful conversation, out of which sprang mutual understanding and a kind of friend-
ship. It seemed to the Benedictine scholar more than coincidence, or at least a very special
kind of coincidence, that the two of them — each operating within his own, Benedictine or
Castalian, limitations — should have discovered this poor instructor at a Wirrttemberg monas-
tery, this man at once fine-strung and rock-hard, at once visionary and practical. Father Jac-
obus concluded that there must be something linking the two of them for the same unspectacular
magnet to affect them both so powerfully. And from that evening on, which had begun with the
Purcell sonata, that link actually existed. Jacobus enjoyed the exchange of views with so well
trained yet still so supple a young mind; this was a pleasure he did not often have. And Knecht
found his association with the historian, and the education Jacobus provided, a new stage on
the path of awakening — that path which he nowadays identified as his life. To put the matter
succinctly: from Father Jacobus he learned history. He learned the laws and contradictions of
historical studies and historiography. And beyond that, in the following years he learned to
see the present and his own life as historical realities.

Their talks often grew into regular disputations, with formal attacks and rebuttals. In the
beginning it was Father Jacobus who proved to be the more aggressive of the pair. The more
deeply he came to know his young friend's mind, the more he regretted that so promising a
young man should have grown up without the discipline of a religious education, rather in
the pseudo-discipline of an intellectual and aesthetic system of thought. Whenever he found
something objectionable in Knecht's way of thinking, he blamed it on that "modern" Castalian
spirit with its abstruseness and its fondness for frivolous abstractions. And whenever Knecht
surprised him by wholesome views and remarks akin to his own thought, he exulted because his
young friend's sound nature had so well withstood the damage of Castalian education. Joseph
took this criticism of Castalia very calmly, repelling the attacks only when the old scholar
seemed to him to have gone too far in his passion. But among the good Father's belittling re-
marks about Castalia were some whose partial truth Joseph had to admit, and on one point he
changed his mind completely during his stay in Mariafels. This had to do with the relationship
of Castalian thought to world history, any sense of which, Father Jacobus said, was totally
lacking in Castalia. "You mathematicians and Glass Bead Game players," he would say, "have
distilled a kind of world history to suit your own tastes. It consists of nothing but the history
of ideas and of art. Your history is bloodless and lacking in reality. You know all about the
decay of Latin syntax in the second or third centuries and don't know a thing about Alexander
or Caesar or Jesus Christ. You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which
nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no to-
morrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow mathematical present."

"But how is anyone to study history without attempting to bring order into it?" Knecht
asked.

"Of course one should bring order into history," Jacobus thundered. "Every science is, among
other things, a method of ordering, simplifying, making the indigestible digestible for the
mind. We think we have recognized a few laws in history and try to apply them to our invest-
igations of historical truth. Suppose an anatomist is dissecting a body. He does not confront
wholly surprising discoveries. Rather, he finds beneath the epidermis a congeries of organs,
muscles, tendons, and bones which generally conform to a pattern he has brought to his work.
But if the anatomist sees nothing but his pattern, and ignores the unique, individual reality of
his object, then he is a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; he is using mathematics on the
least appropriate object. I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a
touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our minds and our methods to order reality;
but first and foremost he must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of
events. Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history one
must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary
and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining
faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one."

Among the remarks of Father Jacobus which Knecht at the time quoted in letters to his
friends, here is one more characteristic outburst:

"Great men are to youth like the raisins in the cake of world history. They are also part of its
actual substance, of course, and it is not so simple and easy as might be thought to distinguish
the really great men from the pseudo-greats. Among the latter, it is the historical moment itself,
and their ability to foresee its coming and seize it, that gives them the semblance of greatness.
Quite a few historians and biographers, to say nothing of journalists, consider this ability to
divine and seize upon a historical moment — in other words, temporary success — as in itself a
mark of greatness. The corporal who becomes a dictator overnight, or the courtesan who for a
while controls the good or ill humor of a ruler of the world, are favorite figures of such hist-
orians. And idealistically minded youths, on the other hand, most love the tragic failures, the
martyrs, those who came on the scene a moment too soon or too late. For me, since I am after all
chiefly a historian of our Benedictine Order, the most attractive and amazing aspects of history,
and the most deserving of study, are not individuals and not coups, triumphs, or downfalls; rather
I love and am insatiably curious about such phenomena as our congregation. For it is one of those
long-lived organizations whose purpose is to gather, educate, and reshape men's minds and souls,
to make a nobility of them, not by eugenics, not by blood, but by the spirit — a nobility as cap-
able of serving as of ruling. In Greek history I was fascinated not by the galaxy of heroes and
not by the obtrusive shouting in the Agora, but by efforts such as those of the Pythagorean
brotherhood or the Platonic Academy. In Chinese history no other feature is so striking as the
longevity of the Confucian system. And in our own Occidental history the Christian Church and
the Orders which serve it as part of its structure, seem to me historical elements of the foremost
importance. The fact that an adventurer contrives to conquer or found a kingdom which lasts
twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years, or that a well-meaning idealist on a royal or imperial
throne once in a while brings greater honesty into politics, or attempts to carry some visionary
cultural project to fruition; that under high pressure a nation or other community has been
capable of incredible feats of achievement and suffering — all that interests me far less than the
ever-recurrent efforts to establish such organizations as our Order, and that some of these efforts
have endured for a thousand or two thousand years. I shall say nothing of holy Church itself; for
us believers it is beyond discussion. But that communities such as the Benedictines, the Domin-
icans, later the Jesuits and others, have survived for centuries and, despite their ups and
downs, the assaults upon them, and the adaptations they have made, retain their face and their
voice, their gesture, their individual soul — this is, for me, the most remarkable and meritorious
phenomenon in history."

Knecht even admired Father Jacobus's spells of angry unfairness. At the time, however,
he had no notion of who Father Jacobus really was. He regarded him solely as a profound and
brilliant scholar and was unaware that here was someone who was consciously participating in
world history, and helping to shape it as the leading statesman of his Order. As an expert in
contemporary politics as well as political history, Father Jacobus was constantly being
approached from many sides for information, advice, and mediation. For some two years, up to
the time of his first vacation, Knecht continued to think of Father Jacobus solely as a scholar,
knowing no more of the man's life, activity, reputation, and influence than the monk cared to
reveal. The learned Father knew how to keep his counsel, even in friendship; and his brothers in
the monastery were also far abler at concealment than Joseph would have imagined.

After some two years Knecht had adapted to the life in the monastery as perfectly as any guest
and outsider could. From time to time he had helped the organist modestly continue the thin
thread of an ancient and great tradition in the monastery's small chorus of motet singers. He
had made several finds in the monastic musical archives and had sent to Waldzell, and especially
to Monteport, several copies of old works. He had trained a small beginners' class of Glass
Bead Game players, among whom the most zealous pupil was young Anton. He had taught Abbot
Gervasius no Chinese, but had at least imparted the technique of manipulating the yarrow sticks
and an improved method of meditating on the aphorisms in the Book of Oracles. The Abbot had
grown accustomed to him, and had long since stopped trying to coax his guest into taking an
occasional glass of wine. The semiannual reports sent by the Abbot to the Glass Bead Game
Master, in reply to official inquiries as to the usefulness of Joseph Knecht, were full of
praise. In Castalia, the lesson plans and marks in Knecht's Game course were scrutinized even
more closely than these reports; the middling level of instruction was recognized, but the Cast-
alian authorities were satisfied with the way the teacher had adapted to this level and, in
general, to the customs and the spirit of the monastery. They were even more pleased, and truly
surprised — although they kept this to themselves — by his frequent and friendly association
with the famous Father Jacobus.

This association had borne all sorts of fruits, and perhaps we may be permitted to say a
word about these even at the cost of anticipating our story somewhat; or at any rate about the
fruit which Knecht most prized. It ripened slowly, slowly, grew as tentatively and warily as
the seeds of high mountain trees that have been planted down in the lush lowlands: these seeds,
consigned to rich soil and a kindly climate, carry in themselves as their legacy the restraint
and mistrust with which their forebears grew; the slow tempo of growth belongs among their
hereditary traits. Thus the prudent old man, accustomed to keep close watch over all possible
influences upon him, permitted the element of Castalian spirit brought to him by his young friend
and antipodal colleague to strike root only reluctantly and inch by inch. Gradually, however, it
sprouted; and of all the good things that Knecht experienced in his years at the monastery, this
was the best and most precious of all to him: this scanty, hesitant growth of trust and openness
from seemingly hopeless beginnings on the part of the experienced older man, this slowly germi-
nating and even more slowly admitted sympathy for his younger admirer as a person and, beyond
that, for the specifically Castalian elements in his personality. Step by step the younger
man, seemingly little more than pupil, listener, and learner, led Father Jacobus — who initially
had used the words "Castalian" and Glass Bead Game player only with ironic emphasis, and often
as outright invective — toward a tolerant and ultimately respectful acceptance of this other
mentality, this other Order, this other attempt to create an aristocracy of the spirit. Father
Jacobus ceased to carp at the youth of the Order, though with its little more than two centur-
ies the Benedictines were the elder by some fifteen hundred years. He ceased to regard the
Glass Bead Game as mere aesthetic dandyism; and he ceased to rule out the prospect of friend-
ship and alliance between two Orders so ill matched in age.

Joseph regarded this partial conquest of Father Jacobus as a personal cause for rejoicing.
He remained unaware that the authorities considered it the utmost of his accomplishments on
his mission to Mariafels. Now and again he wondered in vain what was the real reason for his
assignment to the monastery. Though initially it had seemed to be a promotion and distinction
envied by his competitors, could it not signify a form of inglorious premature retirement, a
relegation to a dead end? But then one could learn something everywhere, so why not here
too? On the other hand, from the Castalian point of view this monastery, Father Jacobus alone
excepted, was certainly no garden of learning or model of scholarship. He wondered, too,
whether his isolation among nothing but unexacting dilettantes was not already affecting his
prowess in the Glass Bead Game. He could not quite tell whether he was losing ground. For all
his uncertainty, however, he was helped by his lack of ambition as well as his already quite
advanced amor fati. On the whole his life as a guest and unimportant teacher in this cosy old
monastic world was more to his liking than his last months at Waldzell as one of a circle of
ambitious men. If fate wished to leave him forever in this small colonial post, he would certainly
try to change some aspects of his life here -- for example, contrive to bring one of his friends
here or at least ask for a longish leave in Castalia every year — but for the rest he would be
content.

The reader of this biographical sketch may possibly be waiting for an account of another
side of Knecht's experience in the monastery, namely the religious side. But we can venture only
some tentative hints. It is certainly likely that Knecht had some deeply felt encounter with
religion, with Christianity as daily-practiced in the monastery. In fact from some of his later
remarks and attitudes it is quite clear that he did. But whether and to what extent he became a
Christian is a question we must leave unanswered; these realms are closed to our researches. In
addition to the respect for religions generally cultivated in Castalia, Knecht had a kind of in-
ner reverence which we would scarcely be wrong to call pious. Moreover, he had already been well
instructed in the schools on the classical forms of Christian doctrine, especially in connection
with his studies of church music. Above all he was well acquainted with the sacramental
meaning and ritual of the Mass.

With a good deal of astonishment as well as reverence, he had found among the Benedictines
a living religion which he had hitherto known only theoretically and historically. He attend-
ed many services, and after he had familiarized himself with some of the writings of Father
Jacobus, and taken to heart some of their talks, he became fully aware of how phenomenal this
Christianity was — a religion that through the centuries had so many times become unmodern and
outmoded, antiquated and rigid, but had repeatedly recalled the sources of its being and there-
by renewed itself, once again leaving behind those aspects which in their time had been modern
and victorious. He did not seriously resist the idea, presented to him every so often in those
talks, that perhaps Castalian culture was merely a secularized and transitory offshoot of
Christian culture in its Occidental form, which would some day be reabsorbed by its parent. E-
ven if that were so, he once remarked to Father Jacobus, his, Joseph Knecht's, own place lay
within the Castalian and not the Benedictine system; he had to serve the former, not the
latter, and prove himself within it. His task was to work for the system of which he was a
member, without asking whether it could claim perpetual existence, or even a long span of life.
He could only regard conversion as a rather undignified form of escape, he said. In similar
fashion Johann Albrecht Bengel, whom they both venerated, had in his time served a small and
transitory sect without neglecting his duties to the Eternal. Piety, which is to say faithful
service and loyalty up to the point of sacrificing one's life, was part and parcel of every
creed and every stage of individual development; such service and loyalty were the only valid
measure of devoutness.

Knecht had been staying with the Benedictine Fathers for some two years when a visitor appear-
ed at the monastery who was kept apart from him with great care. Even a casual introduction
was avoided. His curiosity roused by these procedures, he observed the stranger for the few
days of his visit and indulged in all sorts of speculations. He became convinced that the
stranger's religious habit was a disguise. The unknown held long conferences behind closed
doors with the Abbot and Father Jacobus, and was always receiving and sending urgent messages.
Knecht, who by now had at least heard rumors about the political connections and traditions
of the monastery, guessed that the guest must be a high-ranking statesman on a secret mis-
sion, or a sovereign traveling incognito. As he reflected on the matter, he recalled several
guests of the past few months whose visits, in hindsight, seemed to him equally mysterious or
significant. Now he remembered the chief of the Castalian "police," his friendly mentor Dubois,
and the request that he keep an eye on such events in the monastery. And although he still felt
neither the urge nor the vocation for making such reports, his conscience troubled him for having
not written to the kindly man for so long a time. No doubt Dubois was disappointed in him. So
he wrote him a long letter, tried to explain his silence, and in order to give some substance to
his letter said a few words about his association with Father Jacobus. He had no idea how care-
fully and by how many important persons his letter would be read back in Castalia.





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