EIGHT

 

THE TWO POLES

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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