NINE

 

A CONVERSATION

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        "Laugh?  Why should we?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Knecht had listened to him with unswervingly friendly attentiveness.

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

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

        "Too proud?" Knecht murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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