The Glass Bead Game (36 page)

“‘You are tiring yourself, Joseph,' he said softly, his voice full of that touching friendliness and solicitude you know so well. That was all. ‘You are tiring yourself, Joseph.' As if he had long been watching me engaged in a too-strenuous task and wanted to admonish me to stop. He spoke the words with some effort, as though he had not used his lips for speaking for a long time. And at that moment he laid his hand on my arm—it was light as a butterfly—looked penetratingly into my eyes, and smiled. At that moment I was conquered. Something of his cheerful silence, something of his patience and calm, passed into me; and suddenly I understood the old man and the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity. I understood what I was privileged to see here, and now for the first time grasped the meaning of this smile, this radiance. A saint, one who had attained perfection, had permitted me to dwell in his radiance for an hour; and blunderer that I am, I had tried to entertain him, to question him, to seduce him into a conversation. Thank God the light had not dawned on me too late. He might have sent me away and thus rejected me forever. And I would have been deprived of the most remarkable and wonderful experience I have ever had.”

“I see,” Ferromonte said thoughtfully, “that you have discovered something akin to a saint in our former Music Master. A good thing that you and none other has told me about this. I confess that I would have received such a story with the greatest distrust from anyone else. I am, taken all in all, not fond of mysticism; as a musician and historian I am pedantically given to neat classification. Since we Castalians are neither a Christian congregation nor a Hindu or Taoist monastery, I do not see that any of us qualify for sainthood—that is, for a purely religious category. Coming from anyone but you, Joseph—excuse me, I mean
Domine
—I would regard any such ascription as going off the deep end. But I imagine you do not mean to initiate canonization proceedings for our former Master; you would scarcely find a competent consistory for them in our Order. No, don't interrupt me, I am speaking seriously; I don't mean that as a joke at all. You have told me about an experience, and I must admit that I feel somewhat ashamed, because neither I nor any of my colleagues here at Monteport has entirely overlooked the phenomenon you describe. No, we have merely noticed it and paid it little heed. I am reflecting on the reason for my failure and my indifference. One explanation of course is the fact that you encountered the Master's transformation as a finished product, whereas I witnessed its slow evolution. The former Magister you saw months ago and the one you saw today differed sharply from each other, whereas we, his neighbors, meeting him every so often, observed almost imperceptible changes. But I admit that this explanation doesn't satisfy me. If something like a miracle is taking place before our eyes, however quietly and slowly, we ought to have been more stirred by it than we have been, and would have been if we had been unbiased. Here, I think, I've hit on the reason for my obtuseness: I was not in the least unbiased. I failed to observe the phenomenon because I did not want to observe it. Like everyone else, I noticed our Master's increasing withdrawal and taciturnity, and the concurrent increase in his friendliness, the ever-brighter and more ethereal radiance of his face when we met and he responded mutely to my greeting. I noticed that, of course, and so did everyone else. But I fought against seeing anything more in it, and I fought against it not from lack of reverence for the old Magister, but in part out of distaste for the cult of personality and enthusiasm in general, in part out of distaste for such enthusiasm in this special case, for the kind of cult the student Petrus practices with his idolization of the Master. I've only fully realized all this as you were telling your story.”

Knecht laughed. “That was quite a roundabout way for you to discover your own dislike for poor Petrus,” he said. “But what now? Am I also a mystic and enthusiast? Am I too indulging in the forbidden cult of personality and hagiolatry? Or are you admitting to me what you won't admit to the student, that we have seen and experienced something real, objective, not mere dreams and fancies?”

“Of course I admit it to you,” Carlo replied slowly and thoughtfully. “No one is going to deny your experience or doubt the beauty and serenity of the Magister who can smile at us in that incredible way. The question is only: Where do we classify this phenomenon? What do we call it, how explain it? That sounds like the pedantic schoolmaster, but we Castalians are schoolmasters, after all; and if I want to classify and find a term for your and our experience, it is not because I wish to destroy its beauty by generalizing it, but because I want to describe and preserve it as distinctly as possible. If on a journey I hear a peasant or child humming a melody I have never heard before, that is likewise an important experience for me, and if I immediately try to transcribe this melody as precisely as I can, I am not dismissing and filing it away, but paying due honor to my experience, and taking care that it is not lost.”

Knecht gave him a friendly nod. “Carlo,” he said, “it is a great pity we can so rarely see each other any more. Not all friendships of youth survive reunions. I came to you with my story about the old Magister because you are the only person here whose knowing and sharing it matters to me. Now I must leave it to you to do with my story whatever you like, and to assign whatever term you will to our Master's transfigured state. It would make me happy if you would call on him and stay in his aura for a little while. His state of grace, perfection, wisdom of age, bliss, or whatever we want to call it, may belong to religious life. But although we Castalians have neither denominations nor churches, piety is not altogether unknown to us. And our former Music Master in particular was always a thoroughly pious person. Since there are accounts of blessed, perfected, radiant, transfigured souls in many religions, why should not our Castalian piety occasionally have this kind of blossoming?… It is late by now—I ought to go to sleep—I must leave early tomorrow morning. But I hope to come back soon. Let me just briefly tell you the end of my story. After he had said to me, ‘You are tiring yourself,' I was at last able to stop straining at conversation; I managed not only to be still, but to turn my will away from the foolish goal of using words in the effort to probe this man of silence and draw profit from him. And the moment I gave up that effort and left everything to him, it all went of its own accord. You may want to substitute terms of your own for mine, but please listen to me, even if I seem vague or confound categories. I stayed about an hour or an hour and a half with the old man, and I cannot communicate to you what went on between us or what was exchanged; certainly no words were spoken. I felt, after my resistance was broken, only that he received me into his peace and his brightness; cheerful serenity and a wonderful peace enclosed the two of us. Without my having deliberately and consciously meditated, it somewhat resembled an unusually successful and gladdening meditation whose subject might have been the Magister's life. I saw or felt him and the course of his growth from the time he first entered my life, when I was a boy, up to this present moment. His was a life of devotion and work, but free of obstructions, free of ambition, and full of music. It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he had done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music—his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming—so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music. At any rate, I experienced what radiated from him, or what surged back and forth between him and me like rhythmic breathing, entirely as music, as an altogether immaterial esoteric music which absorbs everyone who enters its magic circle as a song for many voices absorbs an entering voice. Perhaps a nonmusician would have perceived this grace in different images: an astronomer might have seen it as a moon circling around a planet, or a philologist heard it as some magical primal language containing all meanings. But enough for now, I must be going. It's been a great pleasure, Carlo.”

We have reported this episode in some detail, since the Music Master held so important a place in Knecht's life and heart. We have also been drawn into prolixity by the chance circumstance that Knecht's talk with Ferromonte has come down to us in the latter's own record of it in a letter. This is certainly the earliest and most reliable account of the Music Master's “transfiguration”; later, of course, there was a swarm of legends and embroideries.

EIGHT

The Two Poles

The annual Game, remembered to this day as the Chinese House Game, and often quoted, was for Knecht and his friend Tegularius a happy outcome to their labors, and for Castalia and the Boards proof that they had done well to summon Knecht to the highest office. Once more Waldzell, the Players' Village, and the elite had the satisfaction of a splendid and exultant festival. Not for many years had the annual Game been such an event as it was this time, with the youngest and most-discussed Magister in Castalian history making his first public appearance and showing what he could do. Moreover, Waldzell was determined to make up for the failure and disgrace of the previous year. This time no one lay ill, no cowed deputy awaited the great ceremony with apprehension, coldly ringed by the malevolent distrust of the elite, faithfully but listlessly supported by nervous officials. Quiet, inaccessible, entirely the high priest, white-and-gold-clad major piece on the solemn chessboard of symbols, the Magister celebrated his and his friend's work. Radiating calm, strength, and dignity, beyond the reach of any profane summons, he appeared in the festival hall in the midst of his many acolytes, conducting step after step of his Game with the ritual gestures. With a luminous golden stylus he delicately inscribed character after character on the small tablet before him, and the same characters promptly appeared in the script of the Game, enlarged a hundredfold, upon the gigantic board on the rear wall of the hall, to be spelled out by a thousand whispering voices, called out by the Speakers, broadcast to the country and the world. And when at the end of the first act he wrote the summary formula for that act upon his tablet, with graceful and impressive poise gave instructions for the meditation, laid down the stylus and, taking his seat, assumed the perfect meditation posture, in the hall, in the Players' Village, throughout Castalia and beyond, in many countries of the globe, the faithful devotees of the Glass Bead Game reverently sat down for the selfsame meditation and sustained it until the moment the Magister in the hall rose to his feet once again. It was all as it had been many times before, and yet it was all stirring and new. The abstract and seemingly timeless world of the Game was flexible enough to respond, in a hundred nuances, to the mind, voice, temperament, and handwriting of a given personality, and the personality in this case was great and cultivated enough to subordinate his own inspirations to the inviolable inner laws of the Game itself. The assistants and fellow players, the elite, obeyed like well-drilled soldiers, yet each one of them, even though he might be executing only the bows or helping to draw the curtain around the meditating Master, seemed to be performing his own Game, inspired by his own ideas. But it was the crowd, the great congregation filling the hall and all of Waldzell, the thousands of souls who followed the Master down the hieratic and labyrinthine ways through the endless, multidimensional imagery of the Game, who furnished the fundamental chord for the ceremony, the low, throbbing base bell-note, 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 virtuosi and critics of the elite, in the acolytes and officials all the way up to the leader and Master.

It was an exalted festival. Even the envoys from the outside world sensed this, and proclaimed it; and in the course of those days a good many new converts were won over to the Glass Bead Game forever. In the light of this triumph, however, Joseph Knecht, at the end of the ten-day festival, made some highly curious remarks in summing up the experience to his friend Tegularius. “We may be content,” he said. “Yes, Castalia 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 scarcely contemplate 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 forced 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 unambiguous 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 of keeping with our subject, if we failed to take account of the duality, or call it polarity, in the revered Master's life and character, even though it 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-alternating polarity, as the central feature of his nature, and to affirm it as such. As a matter of fact, a biographer who thought it proper to deal with the life of a Castalian Magister entirely in the spirit of hagiography,
ad maiorem gloriam Castaliae,
would not find it at all difficult to describe Joseph 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 historian who holds solely to the documented facts, Magister Knecht's conduct in office appears as blameless and praiseworthy as that of any Glass Bead Game Master in history, not even excepting that 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, sensational, and to the minds of many judges scandalous end, and this end was not mere chance or misfortune but a wholly logical outcome of what went before. It is part of our task to show that it by no means contradicts the reverend Master's brilliant and laudable achievements. Knecht was a great, an exemplary administrator, an honor to his high office, an irreproachable Glass Bead 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 thoughtlessly and unsuspectingly, as did the great majority of his fellow Castalians, for he knew about its origins and history, was conscious of it as a historical entity, subject to time, washed and undermined 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 transformation, had ripened within him in the course of his historical studies. Much was due to the influence of the great Benedictine Father Jacobus, but the germs of such consciousness had been present within him long before. Anyone who honestly tries to explore the meaning of that life, to analyze its idiosyncrasy, will easily discover these germs.