The Glass Bead Game (20 page)

Both made an effort, however, and Designori had all sorts of tales to tell, about his studies and examinations, about journeys to England and to the south, political meetings, parliament. At one point, moreover, he said something that sounded like a threat or a warning. “You will see,” he said. “Soon there will be times of unrest, perhaps wars, in which case your whole existence in Castalia might well come under attack.”

Joseph did not take this too seriously. He merely asked: “And what about you, Plinio? In that case would you be for or against Castalia?”

“Oh that,” Plinio said with a forced smile. “It's not likely that I'd be asked my opinion. But of course I favor the undisturbed continuance of Castalia; otherwise I wouldn't be here, you know. Still and all, although your material requirements are so modest, Castalia costs the country quite a little sum every year.”

“Yes,” Joseph said, laughing, “it amounts I am told, to about a tenth of what our country used to spend annually for armaments during the Century of Wars.”

They met several more times, and the closer the end of Plinio's course approached, the more assiduous they became in courtesies toward each other. But it was a relief to both when the two or three weeks were over and Plinio departed.

The Magister Ludi at that time was Thomas von der Trave, a famous, widely traveled, and cosmopolitan man, gracious and obliging toward everyone who approached him, but severe to the point of fanaticism in guarding the Game against contamination. He was a great worker, something unsuspected by those who knew him only in his public role, dressed in his festive robes to conduct the great Games, or receiving delegations from abroad. He was said to be a cool, even icy rationalist, whose relationship to the arts was one of mere distant civility. Among the young and ardent amateurs of the Glass Bead Game, rather deprecatory opinions of him could be heard at times—misjudgments, for if he was not an enthusiast and in the great public games tended to avoid touching on grand and exciting themes, the brilliant construction and unequalled form of his games proved to the
cognoscenti
his total grasp of the subtlest problems of the Game's world.

One day the Magister Ludi sent for Joseph Knecht. He received him in his home, in everyday clothes, and asked whether he would care to come for half an hour every day at this same time for the next few days. Knecht, who had never before had any private dealings with the Master, was somewhat astonished.

For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist—one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curve that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors.

Knecht attacked the manuscript with eagerness. He himself, after all, had often pondered such proposals, although he had never submitted any. Every active Glass Bead Game player naturally dreams of a constant expansion of the fields of the Game until they include the entire universe. Or rather, he constantly performs such expansions in his imagination and his private Games, and cherishes the secret desire for the ones which seem to prove their viability to be crowned by official acceptance. The true and ultimate finesse in the private Games of advanced players consists, of course, in their developing such mastery over the expressive, nomenclatural, and formative factors of the Game that they can inject individual and original ideas into any given Game played with objective historical materials. A distinguished botanist once whimsically expressed the idea in an aphorism: “The Glass Bead Game should admit of everything, even that a single plant should chat in Latin with Linnaeus.”

Knecht, then, helped the Magister analyze the suggestion. The half-hour passed swiftly. He came punctually the next day, and so for two weeks came daily for a half-hour session with the Magister Ludi. During the first few days it struck him that the Master was asking him to work carefully and critically through altogether inferior memoranda, whose uselessness was evident at first glance. He wondered that the Master had time for this sort of thing, and gradually became aware that the purpose was not just to lighten the Master's work load. Rather, this assignment, although necessary in itself, was giving the Master a chance to subject him, the young adept, to an extremely courteous but stringent examination. What was taking place was rather similar to the appearance of the Music Master in his boyhood; he suddenly became aware of it now by the behavior of his associates, who treated him more shyly, reservedly, and sometimes with ironic respect. Something was in the wind; he sensed it; but now it was far less a source of joy than it had been then.

After the last of these sessions the Magister Ludi said in his rather high, courteous voice and in that carefully enunciated speech of his, but without the slightest solemnity: “Very well; you need not come tomorrow. Our business is completed for the moment. But I shall soon be having to trouble you again. Many thanks for your collaboration; it has been valuable to me. Incidentally, in my opinion you ought to apply for your admission to the Order now. There will be no difficulties; I have already informed the heads of the Order.” As he rose he added: “One word more, just by the way. Probably you too sometimes incline, as most good Glass Bead Game players do in their youth, to use our Game as a kind of instrument for philosophizing. My words alone will not cure you of that, but nevertheless I shall say them: Philosophizing should be done only with legitimate tools, those of philosophy. Our Game is neither philosophy nor religion; it is a discipline of its own, in character most akin to art. It is an art
sui generis.
One makes greater strides if one holds to that view from the first than if one reaches it only after a hundred failures. The philosopher Kant—he is little known today, but he was a formidable thinker—once said that theological philosophizing was ‘a magic lantern of chimeras.' We should not make our Glass Bead Game into that.”

Joseph was surprised. His excitement was so great that he almost failed to hear the last cautionary remarks. It had flashed through his mind that this meant the end of his freedom, the completion of his period of study, admission to the Order, and his imminent enrollment in the ranks of the hierarchy. He expressed his thanks with a low bow, and went promptly to the secretariat of the Order in Waldzell, where sure enough he found himself already inscribed on the list of new nominees to the Order. Like all students at his level, he knew the rules of the Order fairly well, and remembered that the ceremony of admission could be performed by every member of the Order who held an official post in the higher ranks. He therefore requested that this be done by the Music Master, obtained a pass and a short furlough, and next day set out for Monteport, where his patron and friend was staying. He found the venerable old Master ailing, but was welcomed with rejoicing.

“You have come just in time,” the old man said. “Soon I would no longer be empowered to receive you into the Order as a younger brother. I am about to resign my office; my release has already been granted.”

The ceremony itself was simple. On the following day the Music Master invited two brothers of the Order to be present as witnesses, as prescribed by the statutes. Previously, he had given Knecht a paragraph from the rules as the subject of a meditation exercise. It was the familiar passage: “If the high Authority appoints you to an office, know this: every step upward on the ladder of offices is not a step into freedom but into bondage. The higher the office, the tighter the bondage. The greater the power of the office, the stricter the service. The stronger the personality, the less self-will.”

The group then assembled in the Magister's music cell, the same in which Knecht had long ago been introduced to the art of meditation. The Master called upon the novice, in honor of the initiation, to play a chorale prelude by Bach. Then one of the witnesses read aloud the abbreviated version of the rules of the Order, and the Music Master himself asked the ritual questions and received his young friend's oath. He accorded Joseph another hour; they sat in the garden and the Master advised him on how to identify himself with the rules and live by them. “It is good,” he said, “that at the moment I am departing you are stepping into the breach; it is as if I had a son who will stand in my stead.” And when he saw Joseph's sad look he added: “Come now, don't be downcast. I'm not. I am very tired and looking forward to the leisure I mean to enjoy, and which you will share with me frequently, I hope. And next time we meet, use the familiar pronoun of address to me. I could not offer that as long as I held office.” He dismissed him with that winning smile which Joseph had now known for twenty years.

Knecht returned quickly to Waldzell, for he had been given only three days leave. He was barely back when the Magister Ludi sent for him, greeted him affably as one colleague to another, and congratulated him on his admission to the Order. “All that is now lacking to make us completely colleagues and associates,” he continued, “is your assignment to a definite place in our organization.”

Joseph was somewhat taken aback. So this would be the end of his freedom.

“Oh,” he said timidly, “I hope I can prove useful in some modest spot somewhere. But to be candid with you, I had been hoping I would be able to continue studying freely for a while longer.”

The Magister looked straight into his eyes with a faintly ironic smile. “You say ‘a while,' but how long is that?”

Knecht gave an embarrassed laugh. “I really don't know.”

“So I thought,” the Master said. “You are still speaking the language of students and thinking in student terms, Joseph Knecht. That is quite all right now, but soon it will no longer be all right, for we need you. Besides, you know that later on, even in the highest offices of our Order, you can obtain leaves for purposes of study, if you can persuade the authorities of the value of these studies. My predecessor and teacher, for example, while he was still Magister Ludi and an old man, requested and received a full year's furlough for studies in the London Archives. But he received his furlough not for ‘a while,' but for a specific number of months, weeks, and days. Henceforth you will have to count on that. And now I have a proposal to make to you. We need a reliable man who is as yet unknown outside our circle for a special mission.”

The assignment was the following. The Benedictine monastery of Mariafels, one of the oldest centers of learning in the country, which maintained friendly relations with Castalia and in particular had favored the Glass Bead Game for decades, had asked him to send a young teacher for a prolonged stay, to give introductory courses in the Game and also to stimulate the few advanced players in the monastery. The Magister's choice had fallen upon Joseph Knecht. That was why he had been so discreetly tested; that was why his entry into the Order had been accelerated.

FOUR

Two Orders

In a good many respects Joseph Knecht's situation was once again similar to that in his Latin school days after the Music Master's visit. Joseph himself would scarcely have imagined that the appointment to Mariafels represented a special distinction and a large first step on the ladder of the hierarchy, but he was after all a good deal wiser about such matters nowadays and could plainly read the significance of his summons in the attitude and conduct of his fellow students. Of course he had belonged for some time to the innermost circle within the elite of the Glass Bead Game players, but now the unusual assignment marked him to all and sundry as a young man whom the superiors had their eye on and whom they intended to employ. His associates and ambitious fellow players did not exactly withdraw or become unfriendly—the members of this highly aristocratic group were far too well-mannered for that—but an aloofness nevertheless arose. Yesterday's friend might well be tomorrow's superior, and this circle registered and expressed such gradations and differentiations by the most delicate shades of behavior.

One exception was Fritz Tegularius, whom we may well call, next to Ferromonte, Joseph Knecht's closest friend throughout his life. Tegularius, destined by his gifts for the highest achievements but severely hampered by certain deficiencies of health, balance, and self-confidence, was the same age as Knecht at the time of Knecht's admission to the Order—that is, about thirty-four—and had first met him some ten years earlier in a Glass Bead Game course. At the time Knecht had sensed how strong an attraction he exerted upon this quiet and rather melancholy youth. With that psychological instinct which he possessed even then, although without precisely knowing it, he likewise grasped the essence of this love on the part of Tegularius. It was friendship ready for unconditional devotion, a respect capable of the utmost subordination. It was imbued with an almost religious fervor, but overshadowed and held in bounds by an aristocratic reserve and a foreboding of inner tragedy. In the beginning, still shaken and oversensitive, not to say suspicious, as a result of the Designori episode, Knecht had held Tegularius at a distance by consistent sternness, although he too felt drawn to this interesting and unusual schoolfellow. For a characterization of Tegularius we may use a page from Knecht's confidential memoranda which, years later, he regularly drew up for the exclusive use of the highest authorities. It reads: