The Glass Bead Game (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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