The Glass Bead Game (58 page)

All this, like the torrent of light from the sunrise, lasted only a few minutes. Stirred to the core, Knecht watched the wonderful show, in which his pupil before his eyes changed and revealed himself, presenting himself in a new light, alien and entirely his equal. Both of them stood on the walk between house and hut, bathed in the radiance from the east and deeply shaken by their experience. Tito, having barely completed the last step of his dance, awoke from his ecstasy and stood still, like an animal surprised in solitary play, aware that he was not alone, that not only had he experienced and performed something unusual, but that he had also had a spectator. His first thought was how to extricate himself from the situation, which struck him now as somehow dangerous and shaming. He had to act vigorously, and smash the magic of these strange moments, which had totally absorbed and overwhelmed him.

His face, but a moment before an ageless, stern mask, assumed a childish and rather foolish expression, like that of a person awakened too abruptly from a deep sleep. His knees swayed slightly; he looked into his teacher's face with vapid astonishment, and in sudden haste, as though something very important had just occurred to him, something he had neglected, he stretched out his right arm and pointed toward the opposite shore of the lake, which along with half the lake's waters still lay in the great, rapidly contracting shadow of the cliff whose top had already been conquered by the brilliance of the dawn.

“If we swim very fast,” he called out with boyish impetuosity, “we can just reach the other shore before the sun.”

The words were barely uttered, the challenge to a swimming race with the sun barely issued, when Tito with a tremendous leap plunged headfirst into the lake, as if in his high spirits or his shyness he could not get away fast enough and obliterate all memory of the preceding ritual by intensified activity. The water splashed up and closed around him. A few moments later his head, shoulders, and arms reappeared and remained visible on the blue-green surface, swiftly moving away.

Knecht had not, when he came out, had in mind to bathe or swim. Both air and water were much too cool, and after his night of semi-illness, swimming would probably do him little good. But now, in the beautiful sunlight, stirred by the scene he had just witnessed, and with his pupil urging him into the water in this comradely fashion, he found the venture less deterring. Above all he feared that the promise born in this morning hour would be blasted if he disappointed the boy by opposing cool, adult rationality to this invitation to a test of strength. It was true that his feeling of weakness and uncertainty, incurred by the rapid ascent into the mountains, warned him to be careful; but perhaps this indisposition could be soonest routed by forcing matters and meeting it head-on. The summons was stronger than the warning, his will stronger than his instinct. He quickly shed the light dressing gown, took a deep breath, and threw himself into the water at the same spot where his pupil had dived.

The lake, fed by glacial waters so that even in the warmest days of summer one had to be inured to it, received him with an icy cold, slashing in its enmity. He had steeled himself for a thorough chilling, but not for this fierce cold which seemed to surround him with leaping flames and after a moment of fiery burning began to penetrate rapidly into him. After the dive he had risen quickly to the surface, caught sight of Tito swimming far ahead of him, felt bitterly assailed by this icy, wild, hostile element, but still believed he could lessen the distance, that he was engaging in the swimming race, was fighting for the boy's respect and comradeship, for his soul—when he was already fighting with Death, who had thrown him and was now holding him in a wrestler's grip. Fighting with all his strength, Knecht held him off as long as his heart continued to beat.

The young swimmer had looked back frequently and seen with satisfaction that the Magister had followed him into the water. Now he peered once again, no longer saw him, and became uneasy. He looked and called, then turned and swam rapidly back. He could not find him. Swimming and diving, he searched for the lost swimmer until his strength too began to give out in the bitter cold. Staggering, breathless, he reached land at last, saw the dressing gown lying on the shore, and picking it up began mechanically rubbing his body and limbs until the numbed skin warmed again. Stunned, he sat down in the sunlight and stared into the water, whose cool blue-green now blinked at him strangely empty, alien, and evil. He felt overpowered by perplexity and deep sorrow, for with the waning of his physical weakness, awareness and the terror of what had happened returned to him.

Oh! he thought in grief and horror, now I am guilty of his death. And only now, when there was no longer need to save his pride or offer resistance, he felt, in shock and sorrow, how dear this man had already become to him. And since in spite of all rational objections he felt responsible for the Master's death, there came over him, with a premonitory shudder of awe, a sense that this guilt would utterly change him and his life, and would demand much greater things of him than he had ever before demanded of himself.

JOSEPH KNECHT'S POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS

THE POEMS OF KNECHT'S STUDENT YEARS

Lament

No permanence is ours; we are a wave

That flows to fit whatever form it finds:

Through day or night, cathedral or the cave

We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,

We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.

We move, we are the everlasting guest.

No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:

He plays; we are the clay to his desire.

Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;

He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen into stone, to persevere!

We long forever for the right to stay.

But all that ever stays with us is fear,

And we shall never rest upon our way.

 

A Compromise

The men of principled simplicity

Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.

The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:

The myth of depth is an absurdity!

For if there were additional dimensions

Beside the good old pair we'll always cherish,

How could a man live safely without tensions?

How could he live and not expect to perish?

In order peacefully to coexist

Let us strike one dimension off our list.

If they are right, those men of principle,

And life in depth is so inimical,

The third dimension is dispensable.

 

But Secretly We Thirst …

Graceful as dancer's arabesque and bow,

Our lives appear serene and without stress,

A gentle dance around pure nothingness

To which we sacrifice the here and now.

Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright,

So finely tuned, with many artful turns,

But deep beneath the tranquil surface burns

Longing for blood, barbarity, and night.

Freely our life revolves, and every breath

Is free as air; we live so playfully,

But secretly we crave reality:

Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death.

 

Alphabets

From time to time we take our pen in hand

And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet.

Their meaning is at everyone's command;

It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.

But if a savage or a moon-man came

And found a page, a furrowed runic field,

And curiously studied lines and frame:

How strange would be the world that they revealed.

A magic gallery of oddities.

He would see A and B as man and beast,

As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes,

Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,

Like prints of ravens' feet upon the snow.

He'd hop about with them, fly to and fro,

And see a thousand worlds of might-have-been

Hidden within the black and frozen symbols,

Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin.

He'd see the way love burns and anguish trembles,

He'd wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weep

Because beyond this cipher's cross-barred keep

He'd see the world in all its aimless passion,

Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols,

And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion.

He'd think: each sign all others so resembles

That love of life and death, or lust and anguish,

Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish …

Until at last the savage with a sound

Of mortal terror lights and stirs a fire,

Chants and beats his brow against the ground

And consecrates the writing to his pyre.

Perhaps before his consciousness is drowned

In slumber there will come to him some sense

Of how this world of magic fraudulence,

This horror utterly behind endurance,

Has vanished as if it had never been.

He'll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again.

 

On Reading an Old Philosopher

These noble thoughts beguiled us yesterday;

We savored them like choicest vintage wines.

But now they sour, meanings seep away,

Much like a page of music from whose vines

The clefs and sharps are carelessly erased:

Take from a house the center of gravity,

It sways and falls apart, all sense debased,

Cacophony what had been harmony.

So too a face we saw as old and wise,

Loved and respected, can wrinkle, craze,

As, ripe for death, the mind deserts the eyes,

Leaving a pitiful, empty, shriveled maze.

So too can ecstasy stir every sense

And barely felt can quickly turn to gall,

As if there dwelt within us cognizance

That everything must wither, die, and fall.

Yet still above this vale of endless dying

Man's spirit, struggling incorruptibly,

Painfully raises beacons, death defying,

And wins, by longing, immortality.

 

The Last Glass Bead Game Player

The colored beads, his playthings, in his hand,

He sits head bent; around him lies a land

Laid waste by war and ravaged by disease.

Growing on rubble, ivy hums with bees;

A weary peace with muted psalmody

Sounds in a world of aged tranquility.

The old man tallies up his colored beads;

He fits a blue one here, a white one there,

Makes sure a large one, or a small, precedes,

And shapes his Game ring with devoted care.

Time was he had won greatness in the Game,

Had mastered many tongues and many arts,

Had known the world, traveled in foreign parts—

From pole to pole, no limits to his fame.

Around him pupils, colleagues always pressed.

Now he is old, worn-out; his life is lees.

Disciples come no longer to be blessed,

Nor masters to invite an argument.

All, all are gone, and the temples, libraries,

And schools of Castalia are no more. At rest

Amid the ruins, the glass beads in his hand,

Those hieroglyphs once so significant

That now are only colored bits of glass,

He lets them roll until their force is spent

And silently they vanish in the sand.

 

A Toccata by Bach

Frozen silence.… Darkness prevails on darkness.

One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds

Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths,

Compound the night with day, build length and breadth,

Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts,

A loose blue atmosphere, earth's deep dense fullness.

That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation

Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation

Ignites a gleaming terrified new world.

All changes where the seeds of light descend,

Order arises, magnificence is heard

In praise of life, of victory to light's great end.

The mighty urge glides on, to move

Its power into all creatures' being,

Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God's doing:

Now joy and pain, words, art, and song,

World towering on world in arching victory throng

With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love.

Translated by Alex Page

 

A Dream

Guest at a monastery in the hills,

I stepped, when all the monks had gone to pray,

Into a book-lined room. Along the walls,

Glittering in the light of fading day,

I saw a multitude of vellum spines

With marvelous inscriptions. Eagerly,

Impelled by rapturous curiosity,

I picked the nearest book, and read the lines:

The Squaring of the Circle—Final Stage.

I thought: I'll take this and read every page!

A quarto volume, leather tooled in gold,

Gave promise of a story still untold:

How Adam also ate of the other tree …

The other tree? Which one? The tree of life?

Is Adam then immortal? Now I could see

No chance had brought me to this library.

I spied the back and edges of a folio

Aglow with all the colors of the rainbow,

Its hand-painted title stating a decree:

The interrelationships of hues and sound:

Proof that for every color may be found

In music a proper corresponding key.

Choirs of colors sparkled before my eyes

And now I was beginning to surmise:

Here was the library of Paradise.

To all the questions that had driven me

All answers now could be given me.

Here I could quench my thirst to understand,