Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game

and seemingly timeless world of the Game w as flexible enough to respond, in a hundred nuances, to the mind, voice, temperament, and handw riting of a given personality, and the personality in this case was great and cultivated e nough to subordinate his own inspirations to the inviolable inner laws of the Game itself. The a ssistants and fellow players, the elite, obeyed like well-drilled soldiers, yet each one of them, e ven though he might be executing only the bows or helping to draw the curtain around the meditatin g Master, seemed to be performing his own Game, inspired by his own ideas. But it was the cro wd, the great congregation filling the hall and all of Waldzell, the thousands of souls who followe d the Master down the hieratic and labyrinthine ways through the endless, multidimensi o al imagery of the Game, who furnished the fundamental chord for the ceremony, the low, th robbing base bellnote, which for the more simple-hearted members of the community is the best and almost the only experience the festival yields, but which also awakens awe in the subtle vi rtuosi and critics of the elite, in the acolytes and officials all the way up to the leader and Mast er. It was an exalted festival. Even the envoys from t he outside world sensed this, and proclaimed it; and in the course of those days a go od many new converts were won over to the Glass Bead Game forever. In the light of this trium ph, however, Joseph Knecht, at the end of the ten-day festival, made some highly curious remarks in umming up the experience to his friend Tegularius. "We may be content," he said. "Yes, Cas tali and the Glass Bead Game are wonderful things; they come close to being perfect. Only perhaps they are too much so, too beautiful. They are so beautiful that one can scarc ely ontemplate them without fearing for them. It is not pleasant to think that some day they are bound to pass away as everything else does. And yet one must think of that." With this historic statement, the biographer is fo rced to approach the most delicate and mysterious part of his task. Indeed, he would have preferred to postpone it for a while longer and continue -with that placidity which clear and una mbiguous conditions afford to the narrator of them -to depict Knecht's successes, his exemplary conduct of his office, the brilliant peak of his life. But it would seem to us misleading, and out o f keeping with our subject, if we failed to take account of the duality, or call it polarity, in the r vered Master's life and character, even though i t was so far known to no one but Tegularius. From now on our task, in fact, will be to accept this dichotomy in Knecht's soul, or rather this ever-alt ernating polarity, as the central feature of his nature, and to affirm it as such. As a matter of fa ct, biographer who thought it proper to deal with the life of a Castalian Magister entirely in t he spirit of hagiography, ad maiorem gloriam Castaliae, would not find it at all difficult to describe Jose ph Knecht's years as Magister, with the sole exception of the last moments, entirely as a glorious list of achievements, duties performed, and successes. To the eye of the histori an who holds solely to the documented facts, Magister Knecht's conduct in office appears as blam e ess and praiseworthy as that of any Glass Bead Game Master in history, not even excepting tha t of Magister Ludwig Wassermaler who reigned during the era of Waldzell's most exuberant passion for the Game. Nevertheless, Knecht's period in office came to a most unusual, s ensational, and to the minds of many judges scandalous end, and this end was not mere chance or misf rtune but a wholly logical outcome of what went before. It is part of our task to show th at it by no means contradicts the reverend Master's brilliant and laudable achievements. Knech t was a great, an exemplary administrator, an honor to his high office, an irreproachable Glass B ead Game Master. But he saw and felt the glory of Castalia, even as he devoted himself to it , as an imperiled greatness that was on the wane. He did not participate in its life thoughtles sly and unsuspectingly, as did the great majority of his fellow Castalians, for he knew about its ori gins and history, was conscious of it as a historical entity, subject to time, washed and unde rmined by time's pitiless surges. This sensitivity to the pulse of historical process and this feeling for his own self and activities as a cell carried along in the stream of growth and tran sformation, had ripened within him in the course of his historical studies. Much was due to t he influence of the great Benedictine Father Jacobus, but the germs of such consciousness had be en pr sent within him long before. Anyone who honestly tries to explore the meaning of that l ife, to analyze its idiosyncrasy, will easily discover these germs. The man who could say, on one of the finest days o f his life, at the end of his first festival Game and after a singularly successful and impressi v demonstration of the Castalian spirit, "It is not pleasant to think that some day Castalia and th e Glass Bead Game are bound to pass away -and yet one must think of that" -this man had ear ly on, long before he had acquired insight into history, borne within himself a metaphysical sense of the transitoriness of all that has evolved and the problematical nature of everything created by the human mind. If we go back to his boyhood we will remember his depression and uneasin s whenever a fellow pupil disappeared from Eschholz because he had disappointed his teach ers and been demoted from the elite to the ordinary schools. There is no record that a single on of those expelled had been a close friend of young Joseph; what disturbed him was not personal l oss, not the absence of this or that individual. Rather, his grief was caused by the mil d shock to his child's faith in the permanence of Castalian order and Castalian perfection. He him self took his vocation so seriously as something sacred, and yet there were boys and youth s who had been granted the happiness of acceptance into the elite schools of the Province a nd had squandered this boon, thrown it away. This was shocking, and a sign of the power of the w orld outside Castalia. Perhaps also -though here we can only speculate -such incidents arouse d th boy's first doubts of the Board of Educators' infallibility, since this Board now and then brought to Castalia pupils whom it subsequently had to dismiss again. There is no sayi ng whether these earliest stirrings of criticism of authority also affected his thinking. In any case, the boy felt every dismissal of an el ite pupil not only as a misfortune, but also as an impropriety, an ugly glaring stain, whos e presence was in itself a reproach involving all of Castalia. This, we think, is the basis for t hat feeling of shock and distraction which Knecht as a schoolboy experienced on such occasions. Outsi de, beyond the boundaries of the Province, was a way of life which ran counter to Castalia and its laws, which did not abide by the Castalian system and could not be tamed and sublimated by it. And of course he was aware of the presence of this world in his own heart also. He too had imp ulses, fantasies, and desires which ran counter to the laws that governed him, impulses which he ha d only gradually managed to subdue by hard effort. These impulses, he concluded, could be so strong i n a good many pupils that they erupted despite all restraints and led those who yielded to them away from the elite world of Castalia and into that other world which was dominated not by di scipline and cultivation of the mind, but by instincts. To one striving for Castalian virtue tha t world seemed sometimes a wicked underworld, sometimes a tempting playground and arena. For gene rations many young consciences have experienced the concept of sin in this Castalian fo rm. And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world f egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in th is cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again. This is what underlay all the powerful movements, aspirations, and upheavals in Knecht's life. Nor was this ever merel y an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other prob lem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and com munity they love, afflicted with ills. Tracing this same thread further, we come to Knech t's first period in Waldzell, his final years as a schoolboy, and his significant meeting w ith the guest pupil Designori, which we have described in detail in its proper place. This encou nter between the ardent adherent of the Castalian ideals and the worldling Plinio was not o nly intense and long-lasting in its effects, but also had a deeply symbolic significance for young K necht. For the strenuous and important role imposed upon him at that time, seemingly sent his w ay by sheer chance, in fact so closely corresponded with his whole nature that we are temp d to say his later life was nothing but a reiteration of this role, an ever more perfect adap tation to it. The role, of course, was that of champion and representer of Castalia. He had to pla y it once more some ten years later against Father Jacobus, and as Master of the Glass Bead Gam e he played it to the end: champion and representative of the Order and its laws, but one w ho as constantly endeavoring to learn from his antagonist and to promote not the rigid isolati n of Castalia, but its vital collaboration and confrontation with the outside world. The oratorica l ontest with Designori had been partly a game. With his far more substanti