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 towards
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 speciality, 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 untrammelled 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 coloured 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
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 towards 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 humour 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 of 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 this
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
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 on many seminars on stylistics, and in the Glass
Bead Game as well. They learned to
regard their own person 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 admiration 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 rigour 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 an
to instil a heavy dose of scepticism 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 towards 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 of formulas of scholarship as well as
in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the language, 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 centre, 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 towards 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 assume 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 centre 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 favours 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 hand, 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 endeavour 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 of an 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 colours 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 a 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 towards his fellow students from
Waldzell, who went on adulating him even though he withdrew from them. And he felt it especially towards 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 towards
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 the 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 practised the Game as an interesting or amusing speciality, 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 which 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
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 repeated
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 too. 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 practising it
with the traditional yarrow stalks.
Along with the ancient commentaries on the Book of Changes, his
favourite 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 a 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 towards
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 southwards in a blue haze, with sunlit terraced vineyards,
brownstone 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 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 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 colours, 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 mututinal 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 the
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, practised thousands of times and brought to a high
degree of virtuoso dexterity. After he
had gone through the game 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 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
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 favour.
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, practising 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.
Afterwards 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 towards
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 new 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 responsibilities 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 centred around the
Game. Another preoccupation was,
perhaps, that one question of really 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 microcosm naturally sharpened his eyes to all the dubiousness of the
Game. For a little while, perhaps, the
idyll of 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 life 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 favour 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 has 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 towards
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 question 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 Player's'
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
towards 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
in 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 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 seeing 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
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
favour 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 towards 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 travelled, and cosmopolitan man,
gracious and obliging towards 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 -
misjudgements, 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 congruencies 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
colours.
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 behaviour of his associates, who
treated him more shyly, reservedly, and sometimes 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 eminent
enrolment 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 receive 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 honour 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 thinking 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 centres of learning in the country, which maintained friendly
relations with Castalia and in particular had favoured 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.