The Glass Bead Game (10 page)

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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